


whatever a moon has always meant

by resplendissante



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Friendship is Magic, Gen, lydia martin: vampire slayer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-15 15:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resplendissante/pseuds/resplendissante
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia Martin is just trying to put her life back together. Unfortunately, she is living in interesting times. (or; the adventures of Lydia Martin, Vampire Slayer, and her small but growing group of loyal sidekicks.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. whatever is done by only me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just really wanted a story where Lydia was the heroine, because, despite the fact that she's almost as screwed up as everyone else on the show (and season 2 did not help), she's also a total badass. The other thing I wanted was for everyone to stop being stupid and start being friends, so this is - well, a start on that, at least. 
> 
> No particular familiarity with Buffy is necessary to understand anything here - and let's all do what I did and forget that the comics ever happened.
> 
> Titles from ee cummings; I was going to try and find some obscure indie band with wolf-related lyrics, or at least Wolf Parade, but I am super lazy, so I fell back on pretention instead. Let's face it, though, the show didn't set too high a bar in the title department.

i. 

Lydia Martin is a smart girl.

Not like Allison: Allison’s bright. She’ll do fine at whatever not-quite-Ivy-League college she ends up at (provided that she doesn’t follow Scott to his inevitable future in the liberal arts at some institutionally-grey State school). She’ll handle Scott’s frequent forays into the land of poor life choices pretty well, when she’s not going there herself. She’ll get through. That’s the kind of smart most smart people recognize in themselves; the curious, instinctual kind of smart. It’s why Lydia made friends with her (apart from her killer shoes): It’s the closest to actual intelligence you can get in Beacon Hills.

Besides, they have the same shoe size.

Lydia Martin is not bright. She’s Maria Meyer smart. She is investigating-string-theory-at-age-11 smart, solving-the-Poincaré-Conjecture-in-2009-damn-you-Gregoriy-Perelman smart, future Dr.-Lydia-Martin-of-MIT smart. She’s Marie _goddamned_ Curie smart, screw the cliché.

So she’s a genius, that’s great. Let’s recap her last few months, starting with the instigatory event for her participation in the proceedings:

  * Bitten by a werewolf;1
  * Hospitalized for a werewolf bite, from which she neither died nor turned into a werewolf herself;2
  * Possessed and manipulated by the biter,3causing her to: 
    * Run naked through the woods in near-freezing temperatures for two days;
    * Hallucinate both privately and _in public_ ;
    * Spike the punch with a hallucinogen at her own birthday party;
    * Blow a system-depressant variant of wolfsbane into another werewolf’s face, all of which was in order to:
    * Resurrect a dead, potentially sociopathic werewolf from his grave underneath the singed floorboards where his own family burned to death ten years ago;4
    * Use the power of love to resurrect her ex-boyfriend and cure him of turning into a murderous lizard thing all the time.5



[Notes: (1) At the Spring Formal. In her new dress.  Undignified. (2) During which her popularity fell so dramatically that she might as well not have bothered with her hair for the last _ten years_. (3) She still feels vaguely sexually assaulted by the nonconsensual hallucination kissing that went on there. (4) This involved an interesting experiment involving moonlight and mirrors. Less interesting: Application of blood from nephew to uncle, in non-laboratory conditions, without the appropriate controls. (5) He _still_ doesn’t want to get back together. Not that she does.]

Basically, her life has been a shit-show since this whole werewolf thing went down at the start of the school year. Screaming in classrooms (and ice-rinks – who does that?). Resurrecting not one but _two_ people. Breaking many, many laws of the land, common sense and natural science.

And she still feels _off_. That’s the worst of it. Ever since getting out of that hospital bed, ever since that shower where she pulled clumps of her own hair (hallucination hair) out of the drain – her body feels wrong. Like something’s changed, or shifted, or, and this is the scary part, fallen into place.

So she goes to a party, drinks five beers, narrowly avoids making out with Greenberg, gets sick of the stares crawling down her neck, and leaves two hours later, somewhat unsteadily.

“Whatever,” she tells Allison, who’s worrying from home, where she spends most of her time these days. “Creatures of the night: Come get me. I’m here, I’m young, I’m vaguely anemic. Do your worst.”

Allison laughs, but uneasily.  “Do you have the taser I gave you?” she asks. It was an apology taser, from the night a few weeks ago when Lydia had the Allison version of the _If anyone had told me what the fucking fuck was going on, I might not have screwed you all at the party and resurrected a possible serial killer, so good job being honest with your best friend, I really appreciate that_ talk.

Allison had cried. Lydia had not.

“In my bag,” Lydia says. A lie. She doesn’t care for tasers. They’re inaccurate: Sometimes they’ll murder someone, sometimes they’re a funny fifty seconds on YouTube and everyone goes home. If Lydia is going to kill someone, she wants to be damned sure she means to. That’s why she stole her dad’s good hunting knife, which actually is in her bag.

She’s putting one foot in front of the other, doing an exaggeratedly straight drunk walk. It’s not far to home, and Lydia – well, she’s maybe been a little down since Jackson had his own little talk with her, the _Thanks for giving me a hand with that whole dying thing, but I need freedom to be me right now. Keep the key if you want, though_ talk. She’s maybe looking for trouble, or distraction, and not just the kind she’s going to be in when her mom smells the liquor someone spilled on her True Religions. (That’s normally the kind of crime that Greenberg would pay for in blood, but the truth is that Lydia is a little bit burnt out on revenge right now.)

So she’s a little a scared. It’s nice, actually, nice in a way that is distant from all her other problems.  The phone is warm against her ear, an anchor to her real life, and she wants to hang up. Cut the connection. Not forever, just for this moment, tonight. She doesn’t hang up, though. Allison’s still talking. It would be rude.

Lydia is not wearing heels; she might be five feet tall, but she doesn’t have a complex about it. Her feet hurt anyway, because she’s wearing the most uncomfortable flats known to mankind. The Tory Burch medallion is digging into her left foot, and there’s serious blister on her right heel.

It’s cool but not cold, one of those perfect spring days that turned into a nice night to party, if one happened to be in the mood for that kind of thing. Her jacket – a military style Alexander McQueen that had been her Aunt Amanda’s until the season was over a few years ago, at which point it came into Lydia’s life and never left – is loose because she’s lost weight.

(She can feel her hipbones now, when she lies on her stomach to go to sleep. They dig into the extra-firm Sealy Posturpedic. She doesn’t care for that.)

The street is dark, and quiet. Allison’s saying something about risks and safety and blah, blah, blah. Wasn’t Allison the one who flat-out tried to kill lizard-Jackson with a knife? “Allie,” Lydia says, “Quit worrying. Go to bed.”

“I can come pick you up,” she offers, because she really is nice.

“What, because it’s safer to wait around on a dark street than to walk the three blocks home? Get some sleep. You’re starting to sound like Stiles.”

“To be fair, his plans are usually better,” Allison says after a moment. “Or at least more complicated.6”

[(6) This is true. Stiles may be the walking embodiment of Joseph Gordon Levitt in _10 Things I Hate About You_ , only shorter, and Lydia does not want to date him in any way, but she respects that he’s stayed pretty much unscathed throughout this entire ordeal of theirs. And his monster spreadsheet is awesome. He sends her updated versions like clockwork, every two days, and she codes it into something werewolf-user-friendly in Visual Basic.]

“Don’t think you’re keeping me on the phone until I get home,” Lydia says severely. “I’m hanging up on you.”

“Nice,” Allison says, but she’s laughing, and Lydia’s smiling; she can feel the corner of her mouth pull up.  “Stay safe. Have a good night.”

“They all are,” Lydia says airily, just like she believes it. She says goodbye, hits ‘end’, and slides the phone into the back pocket of her jeans, a place it only goes when she’s drunk enough not to care about breaking the line of her outfit.

It’s quiet, actually. Quiet enough that she wishes she’d just kept Allison on the phone. There’s the wind, and a car passes, but it’s not enough to distract her from her blister. She’s still drunk – not really drunk, not blackout drunk, but the tipsy kind that used to end in sex at Jackson’s, her on top – and it’s making her stomach twist with the uncomfortable reality that she is super fucking depressed right now.

And why not? She’s got two years of high school left because her lame-ass parents won’t let her just graduate already; her ex-boyfriend, with whom she is pathetically and devastatingly in love, is remaining steadfastly ex; most of her friends are werewolves; her _best_ friend is a werewolf _hunter_ ; she still sees the guy who psychically jerked her chain around town; her feet hurt; there’s whiskey on her favorite jeans; and nothing, _nothing_ is happening for her -

Something twinges in her gut.7

[(7) Normally, she wouldn’t admit to having anything so crude as a _gut_ , but in this case it’s a metaphor, and really more physically located near her diaphragm anyway. But nothing twinges in your diaphragm, literarily speaking.]

It’s something more than hearing what could easily be wind rustling last year’s leaves. It’s a half-second’s warning before she’s turning on her blistered foot with her arm up. She blocks an arm, realizes that it was aimed at the back of her head, and throws a punch at a shadowed face before she can think about it.

Whoever it is – a woman, judging by the boobs falling out of that atrocious Hot Topic mess of a dress – flies back, landing in a pool of trashy, crunchy polyester. She tosses her head back, getting overdyed black hair out of her face. She’s snarling. Her face, which is –

Bumpy, actually, and Lydia thinks _werewolf_ , and maybe _Erica_ , except that Erica’s never shown an inclination toward soaking her hair in Manic Panic. And there’s something else, something anatomically different – more pronounced ridges in the forehead, canines extended far past what she considers the werewolf norm (although to be fair, her sample size is pathetically small), and when Lydia glances at her hands, they’re plain old human-looking hands. No claws, just this tragic matte black polish.

“What the hell are you?” they demand of one another at the same time, but Lydia doesn’t have time to explain exactly what she is,8 because the woman is flying back at her, and she has to swing around, grateful that the bottle of Jack at the bottom of her purse is full, because it makes a satisfying _thump_ when it hits the freak straight in her topographically-problematic face. 9

[(8) And where else is she going to have the opportunity to talk about her genius? It’s a social catastrophe at that school to understand basic stoichiometry, let alone the applied mathematics of social networking and change theory. (9) She’s also grateful that she took her mother’s new Marni instead of one of her own bags, because she’s pretty sure the bottle breaks.]

The woman’s staggering back, bleeding – maybe. It’s hard to tell. They’re between streetlights, in front of one of those nauseatingly whimsical McMansions (down to the lattice trim and picket fence – so basic). Its windows are dark, but Lydia still thinks about screaming for help.

The woman spits, “Bitch!” at her, like that’s supposed to hurt her feelings?

“Seriously? You just attacked _me_. I’m not the bitch in this situation. And quite frankly the word itself is a little beneath me.” Lydia’s breath is coming too fast, and her heart is pounding. She’s never hit someone before in her life. 10 It’s surreal – maybe another hallucination. Maybe she’s going all John Nash up in Beacon Hills, destined to a lifetime of psychiatric drugs and misery.

[(10) This is a lie. She punched Stiles Stilinski in the face on the first day of third grade, because he wouldn’t stop trying to touch her hair. She still maintains that this was a defense of her basic right to bodily autonomy.] 

The woman charges her. It’s pretty quick after that: Lydia knees her in the stomach with force she had no idea she could summon, drives her forward, with the intent of laying her out and crushing her larynx with a foot, and accidentally impales her on the McMansion’s twee picket fence.

The woman’s mouth drops open.

Then she explodes into dust.

Adrenaline, she tells herself, looking over her shoulder: The street seems empty. It could have happened to anyone. Maybe Peter left some lupine fight club secrets in your head when he destroyed your senses of self and security. You’re good at everything else.11 Why not this?

[(11) Not everything. Cheerleading was so humiliating that Lydia secretly petitioned the school to eliminate it, citing irreversible damage based on the message that women exist only to congratulate men on their achievements, rather than to become fully-actualized human beings on their own terms. She succeeded.]

She doesn’t run back home, but despite her blister, the walk takes a lot less time than usual. She lets Prada out to pee (knowing her mother, who still isn’t home from her Match.com date, the poor girl hasn’t been out all day). She locks the door, hangs up the McQueen coat, empties her mother’s purse into the trash (all except her dad’s knife, which she rinses in the sink and leaves there), and leaves it on the kitchen table.

Finally, she strips out of her clothes, which feel disgusting, puts on her favorite pajamas12 and tucks herself into bed.

[(12) She’s had them since she was twelve. They’re sateen – not even good quality – and emerald green, a color she eschews on the grounds that not all redheads are created to maintain the exact same color palette status quo. They were from her Grams, who was so proud to have found them at Target that she spent extra on 3-day shipping to get them there for Lydia’s birthday. Lydia loves her grandmother more than she loves either of her parents, and her stupid parents are still alive.]

Maybe she should call Allison, or Stiles, or even that freakshow Derek Hale. She doesn’t, though. Her phone is fine even if it does smell kind of boozy, but she doesn’t even bother scrolling through her Werewolves & Freaks contacts group. What would she say? Some lady tried to kill me, and I accidentally made her disintegrate into ash?

She doesn’t want anyone trading looks over her continued adventures in Crazyville. What else could it be? Except maybe that someone of the lycanthrope variety wants her dead.

Lydia Martin – genius, holder of mysterious werewolf immunity, fabulous redhead - doesn’t want to think about that, actually.

Instead, she grabs the bottle of Xanax on her bedside table and taps out a tab. Considers it for a moment, then taps out another one. She swallows them dry, turns off the light, and goes to sleep.

 

ii.

That night she dreams about falling; drowning; bleeding on a dirt road; and being run through with a sword, right through her chest.

In other words – the usual.

 

iii.

The creak of a hinge wakes her up. Her mother’s in the doorway, holding the purse. “Really?” her mother asks, looking tired. She’s still wearing her dress from last night, but her lipstick’s worn off, and her mascara is flaking.                                

“Just an accident,” Lydia says. Which is true, more or less.

“When are you going to stop punishing me for – “ Her mother swallows. Lydia thinks that her weakness is kind of gross. “For everything,” she finishes.

“I’m not punishing you for anything13,” Lydia says, and her words feel like they’re not even hers. She’s still high on the Xanax, obviously. “I’m just living my life.”

[(13) Lie.]

“Christ,” her mother says, but leaves her alone.

She goes back to sleep.

 

iv. 

Her phone rings, waking her for a second time. It’s Allison. “Hey,” Allison says, and she’s been crying; Lydia can tell by the stuffiness in her voice.

“Hey,” Lydia says. It’s almost noon, according to the wall clock. “What’s up?” She keeps her voice casual. Allison hates it when people discern her mental state from her voice. Lydia lets her keep thinking that she’s some kind of emotional enigma. They’re friends. That’s what friends do.

“Do you want to come over?”

“Do we have to listen to the _Virgin Suicides_ soundtrack again?”

“I was thinking it was more of a _Modern Family_ kind of day. My dad’s – out. And it’s kind of – quiet, you know?”

Lydia loves Gloria – who doesn’t – and she doesn’t want Allison to start crying, so she says, “I’ll be over in an hour.”

She slides out of bed. Her head is a little fuzzy, but beyond that, she is beer-and-Xanax-hangover free.Her pajamas slide against her skin, and she looks down at her feet for a few moments. Then she puts them on the plush carpet14 and stands determinedly.

[(14) Mom had the floors and everything else redone after the divorce. It was some kind of remodeling revenge thing; every time Dad came over to pick her up for dinner, something would be different. The carpets, the kitchen, Lydia’s clothes.]

Her shower is perfunctory, her hair piled on top of her head in a messy topknot; she knows that it looks intentional. She exfoliates and moisturizes, because a bad year is no excuse for abandoning a perfectly good skincare regimen, and pulls on a fresh pair of jeans, hopping a few times to inch them up over her hips before finding a bra and a long, swingy jersey shirt it won’t show under. Once she’s smoothed on a layer of beauty balm, highlighted her cheekbones, lined her eyes with a soft dove-gray pencil, and done some other shit with some eye shadow and mascara and tinted lip balm and cheek stain, she’s ready. 

She might be crazy, constantly hallucinating, hopelessly emotionally compromised, and having the worst year of her life, but she’s still Lydia Martin, and that means she’s still better than 99% of the brain-dead morons in this godforsaken town.

 

v.

“I can’t watch this,” Allison says, covering her face with her hands. She’s laughing. “It’s too embarrassing. Oh my god! No, why did her dad have to walk by, why is her husband so stupid, oh my god. Are you kidding? This is impossible. Who writes this show?”

Lydia’s grinning despite herself. Watching TV with Allison is always fun: She feels _everything_ for the characters, right down where her mushy little heart meets her over-exaggerated sense of responsibility. Yet, somehow, she still can’t stop watching _Modern Family_ , which is _based_ on exploiting secondhand embarrassment. It’s adorable. It makes Lydia glad that they’re friends. “Oh, hey, Gloria’s going to help her out,” Lydia says. “Have you noticed that Gloria is the best?”

Allison’s look is baleful, even though Lydia is totally distracting her from her pain. “You’re just saying that because you _are_ Gloria,” she says. “A tiny, pale Gloria with no accent.”

“Who would never marry an old dude,” Lydia adds, but she is satisfied with this assessment.15

[(15) More or less. She likes to think that she lacks the stereotypical redhead (or Colombian) temper, having instead a coolheaded knack for destroying the lives of those who cross her with subtle yet insidious malice. Also, she does not plan on children, especially ones who wear _ponchos_.]

“ _Thank God_ it’s over,” Allison says, pulling a pillow over her face as the credits fade out. “That was horrible. I don’t know what kind of people made this show.”

“You’re the one who keeps DVRing it,” Lydia points out.

“I know! It’s addictive! Like drugs. They’re basically drug dealers. Ruining my life.”

Lydia loves Allison. “We can watch another one, if you want,” she says, using her foot to nudge the remote in Allison’s direction.

Allison’s hair is messy and she’s wearing yoga pants and one of her dad’s NRA t-shirts, but she’s grinning and blushing and grabbing the remote, so Lydia just settles back with her bottle of diet Coke and lets herself enjoy the moment. The last few months have been bereft of actual fun – minus winning at State, thank you Stilinski – and she just wants to curl up in this feeling. She leans her cheek against the couch, watching dust motes float in a beam of afternoon sunlight.

The dust reminds her, but today is Saturday, and she doesn’t think about Friday nights until Sundays at the very earliest.  It might be a little hypocritical not to tell Allison about this latest possible hallucination episode16 but what would be hypocrisy in someone else is simply time management for Lydia. She has a system. Her system works. The end.

[(16) Evidence for hallucination: Person exploding into dust. Evidence against hallucination: These things do happen.]

“Oooh, let’s watch that one,” she says instead, when Allison’s thumb hovers over the remote’s OK button. “It’s the one with Elizabeth Banks.”

They watch it. It’s not until later, when they’re making tea in the kitchen that Allison says, “I’ve been thinking about Matt a lot lately.”

“What about him?” Lydia asks. Matt didn’t impress her when he was alive, and he doesn’t impress her now.

“Just that – I _was_ him,” Allison says, and Lydia blinks. “I mean – what I did to Boyd and Erica, what I tried to do to Derek and everyone else. Because of my mom, even because of Kate, even though I _know_ what she – “ Allison swallows. Lydia crosses her arms and watches the electric kettle in the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t say anything. This has _revelatory monologue_ written all over it, and pours out of Allie’s mouth unstoppably. She’s probably been holding this in for days. “It’s like, we keep talking about him, and it’s kind of either, like, poor Matt, he was so screwed up 17 or, I don’t know, evil Matt, how could he do this, but I did what he did, or I tried to, I wanted to, I _told_ people to, and I don’t know how everyone doesn’t hate me either.”

[(17) When have people been having these ‘poor Matt’ conversations? Not around Lydia, that’s for damn sure. It’s absurd. Without getting into the existence of pure evil in the universe, surely they can all agree that stalker, murderer, and extremely ineffective wannabe date-rapist Matt was in full control of his mental faculties, and is therefore undeserving of post-mortem pity. She obviously has some heads to knock together.]

Lydia crosses her arms. It’s time for her kind of monologue, which is in the _emo-smackdown_ category “Allison,” she says, “if you’re expecting me to stand here and hold your hand over your unfortunate little episode, I mean, have you met me? Obviously you probably shouldn’t have shot that kid Boyd with all those arrows, or let your grandpa electrocute him and Erica in your creepy hunter basement.”

Allison’s eyes are overflowing with tears; silent, miserable, self-hating tears. Lydia lets herself soften a little bit, because she knows Allison won’t tell. “Your crazy aunt who you still loved even though she was batshit died right in front of you. Not to mention, she burned Derek Hale’s entire family to death, so you have to deal with who she really was, too. Your mom killed herself instead of dealing with her newfound lycanthropy, and your grandpa was a straight-up psycho who used you to try and get the thing that your mom killed herself over - with absolutely no in-law resistance, either. Also, your werewolf boyfriend was being kind of a dick to you." She pauses, just for effect, and flips her hair. "Matt had, like, ten years to get crazier and crazier instead of investing in some solid psychiatric help. You – got over it. So stop moping and just be better.”

She’s being hugged before she can sidestep it. For some reason, she doesn’t disentagle herself. She just lets Allison’s long arms fold themselves around her, and even hugs her back, because she is a damn good friend. “Thanks, you jerk,” Allison mutters into her neck.

“You should probably apologize for the whole torture thing at some point, or you’re going to keep feeling bad,” Lydia says, in exactly the tone of voice that conveys _Because of your weak human emotions_ and Allison’s laughing. “God, Argent. How long have you been writing about all these feelings in your kitty-cat diary?”

“I don’t know,” Allison says, wiping her eyes. “A while, I guess. I just feel like everything was so – out of control.”

Lydia says, “Well, it was.” 

“I really missed you,” Allison says quietly, sniffling. “This entire time – ever since you were in the hospital. You really are my best friend. I wanted to talk to you so many times - ”

“Of course I am,” Lydia says, cutting her off before they have to rehash the whole _And this is why you tell Lydia absolutely_ everything _important_ conversation. “And you’re lucky, too, you got in under the deadline. I was thinking about picking three rando losers to make over in my image, but I left it too long and some old creeper in a basic leather jacket beat me to it.”

That makes Allison laugh, and then Lydia’s laughing, too, the kind where you’re both just lost to giggling – that inside joke kind of moment where even if it’s not all right, at least you have each other.

“You know what I want?” Allison says, when she’s wiped her eyes. The kettle has already boiled and switched off automatically, but neither of them can be bothered with the tea anymore.

“A stiff drink?” Lydia suggests, without much hope.

“I was thinking Frappucinos,” Allison retorts. “Ventis. And _not_ the gross light ones, either.”

“You’re such a Zooey Deschanel,” Lydia complains, grabbing her purse.

“I already _told_ you I’m growing out my bangs!”

vi.

That night, Lydia doesn’t fall asleep for a long time after getting into bed. When she does, she dreams about: Running in a corset, her legs lost in skirts. Her breath, short and visible in the cold winter air. Bells ringing. An axe, in her throat. 

And then nothing, nothing, nothing.

vii.

Sunday morning is way more pleasant than Saturday. For one thing, she’s not hungover. For another, there’s a note on the bathroom mirror from her mother: _Lydia. Have to be in Eugene for a meeting on a new resort development tomorrow morning, so I’m leaving this afternoon from the office. Money in your account. I’ll call you tonight. Back Tuesday. Love, Mom._  

That means she has the house to herself for a few days. Most parents would make her go stay at her dad’s, but Lydia’s mother is still of the opinion that Lydia chose to live here because her father is a tyrant of some kind.18 He’s not, but she likes the solitude of being alone in the house, free to order arugula on her gourmet pizza and make cocktails she looked up on the internet.

[(18) The divorce petition cited irreconcilable differences. Those being: Mutual adultery, basic incompatibility, and minor financial malfeasance. Lydia’s dad is pretty much the male version of her mother, which is why they never would have worked out. As a parent, he’s just annoying, and he does insist on a curfew, which makes Mom’s house by far the preferable choice.]

The doorbell rings at around 8:30, when she’s paging through the _Beacon Hills Tribune_ ; a clipped-out article sits at her right wrist. It’s too early for any of her deadbeat friends, except Jackson, who wakes up – used to wake up – at five every morning for a ten-mile run and circuit training before lacrosse practice.  She pads through the front hallway in her bare feet and opens the door to absolutely freaking no one.

Fear thrills through her stomach. She’s been down this road before. She hears Prada’s claws clicking on the floor behind her, feels tears sting her eyes, but then Prada’s nudging at an envelope on the doorstep. If Prada’s touching it – it’s real, right? And a plain white envelope, no matter _what’s_ inside it, is too unsymbolic to be a hallucination. She looks up; there’s not so much as a sprig of aconite in sight. 19 The envelope has her name on it, but nothing else: No use in pretending it went through the mail on a Sunday.

 _Lydia Martin_ in printing she doesn’t recognize; not Allison’s loopy, half-grown-up script, or Jackson’s precise sans-serif, or Scott or Stiles’s boy-print. There’s something more than a letter in there; it’s heavy.

[(19) And she’s committed to memory every single picture of wolfsbane she could find.]

She slips her little finger under the seal and opens it, peering inside, half-expecting – something horrible. A big spider (not that she’s afraid of spiders, for God’s sake, they’re almost never venomous) or someone’s finger (ditto severed fingers), something meant to shake her.

It’s a crucifix. A medium-sized sterling-silver crucifix on a chain. The note attached to it – in the same unfamiliar print – says, _To keep you safe._

She stands on the porch in her bare feet for a few more moments, until Prada whines at the cold. Then she drops the note and the necklace back into the envelope, crumples it into a ball, and throws it as hard as she can into the bushes next door.

 

viii.

That night, she dreams about lying in the snow until the world fades into darkness.

 

ix.

Monday morning is quiet; her first period is a spare, technically for studying, but mostly she uses it to perfect her liquid eyeliner in the library. She sits through second-period Chemistry, taking notes on the number of times Mr. Harris makes a mistake he has to correct before anyone notices, naps through English, and then takes her lunch to Allison’s table, where Stiles is currently making an increasingly-unstable stack of everyone’s Jell-O pudding containers and Scott is pretending not to stare at Allison’s face. She sits across from Allison, next to Scott, and eats three bites of her quinoa salad before she makes the decision.

“I’m going to be the bigger person,” she announces to the table, putting her fork down, “and tell you that I have a problem that I cannot solve myself. This is not to say that I think any of you will be able to solve it, but given the problems we’ve had this year regarding appropriate information flows, I thought I would set a good example.” She folds her hands in front of her, primly.

There is silence; Stiles even stops with the pudding tower, and Scott has his adorable little “awoo?” expression on – the one that always reminds her of Prada encountering a squirrel on her walks. Allison just looks at her, eyebrow raised.

That’s nice. She appreciates their focus. 

“On Friday night I killed a vampire,” she says.

Nobody is focused for a while after that.

“When you say a vampire, what do you actually mean by that, because that’s kind of a big deal, I’ve never heard _anything_ about vampires before,” Stiles manages to get out, once Scott’s stopped sputtering.

Lydia lays out her evidence. It is as follows:

  * On Friday night, as she was walking home from a party, she was accosted by a young woman in a truly hideous dress;
  * This woman attempted to hit her in the head;
  * At which point Lydia may have accidentally skewered her on an extremely unnecessary and borderline tacky picket fence;
  * Which caused her to disintegrate into either dust or ashes.20



[(20) Having not had the presence of mind to collect a sample, she can’t make a definitive call on the material’s composition. Going by metaphor, it would be ash, but if you take into consideration the actual state of a dead body, which has to use _some_ kind of energy to animate itself, dust may be a better descriptor.]

She pulls out the _Tribune_ article she’d saved from yesterday’s paper. “Also, she was reported dead on Tuesday last week.” Inset into the article is the girl, Samantha Pryor - a local community college student and former president of the California Gothic Society, Beacon Hills Chapter. 21

[(21) Lydia is _sure_ that goths don’t _have_ to wear polyester.]

Stiles plucks the article from her fingers. She allows this. Apart from her, he’s the smart one. He scans it, eyes flicking down the newsprint. “She died of – _exsanguination_?”

“What?”

“Blood loss,” Stiles translates for Scott.

“So – you killed someone who was already dead, by pushing her onto a picket fence?”

Lydia says, “That’s what I’ve been _saying_.”

 

x.

Very long story short, the action items from the caf meeting are as follows:

  * Lydia and Stiles: Spot-check Gerard’s bestiary for references to vampires, vampirism, etc. Previous concentration on lizard monsters may have distracted from valuable information regarding other supernatural phenomena. 
    * Stiles: Update monster database to include any new revelations.
    * Stiles: Keep updating monster database until it is actually useful in new monster situations.
  * Lydia and Scott: Test new ass-kicking abilities.22
  * Allison: Interrogate Mr. Argent. (Subtly.)
  * Scott and Stiles: Interrogate Derek and Peter. Subtlety probably unnecessary.23 



[(22) Technically, Stiles will be there too, but Scott is the one who will be getting punched, unless Stiles goes for her hair again. Scott doesn’t seem worried, which means he’s underestimating her. She doesn’t mind, though. She does her best work under the radar. (23) This is the part of the plan no one is comfortable with. Derek, like any sane twenty-something harboring a potentially dangerous murderer in the burnt-out shell of his family home while trying to build a new little family of unstable lycanthropes, is unhappy about Scott’s refusal to join his pack. Jackson has also refused, but who would want him, anyway. In fact, lately it’s pretty much just Derek, dear old Uncle Peter, and Isaac, since Boyd and Erica have obviously found a new alpha to boss them around. Good for them.]

Lydia feels tired. She obviously needs to take her eight hours more seriously; it’s not that there are bags underneath her eyes (with concealer, who could tell even if there were?), but she has a sort of numb feeling in her face. Obviously, it is at this exact moment that Jackson makes an appearance. (It’s not really an appearance. They do have this class together. But if she taught him one thing, it was that _every_ entrance can be an appearance.)

“Hey,” he says, sitting down into the seat next to her.

Her stupid heart hurts, but she says, “Hey,” like she could care less. With Jackson, it’s all about appearances. Well, that’s true of everyone, isn’t it?

“How are you?” he asks. It’s an attempt to be nice. She hates it, him, everything.

“Perfect,” she says, “obviously.” She flips her hair over her shoulder, opens her Bio textbook, not that she even needs it.

“Cool,” he says, and then, “Me too,” lamely, and then class starts.

A minute or two later, her mechanical pencil splinters into pieces of plastic and lead in her grip.

(He doesn’t even look over. What kind of werewolf just ignores that kind of thing?)

 

xi.

It’s dusk, and Scott’s backyard is silent.

(It didn’t start that way. It started with Stiles all high on sugar and caffeine, urging them on. Scott was laughing, in his mildly-cute self-deprecating way. And he’d said something like, _Okay, just try to hit me_ , and she’d shifted in her Pumas, feeling the stretch of her yoga leggings, stepping back so that she could swing forward. And then, well.)

“Hooooo-ly shit,” Stiles says, breaking the silence from his vantage point on the steps. He’s standing, now, hands sort of flailing around his face, elbows in the air. “Holy shit. “

Scott isn’t standing. Scott is sprawled on the dead grass lawn, dazed, fifteen feet away from Lydia.24

[(24) In her defense, he hadn’t even _braced_ himself.]

He groans. Stiles calls, “You okay, there, buddy?” and Scott lifts a hand in a wavering little thumbs-up. He doesn’t move. 

Lydia walks over, goes up a few steps, and casts her eyes over the yard, the situation, then looks at Stiles. “What do you think?” she asks, her voice dead even.

He grins, wide and generous, spreading his freckles out over his nose. “I think that was the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

It makes her laugh, and then he starts giggling, too. They’re both doubled over, sitting on the steps, when Scott and his still-healing jaw make their sheepish way over. “Lydia,” he says, “I think maybe you’re turning into a werewolf.”

“Forget that,” Stiles says, recovering. “She’s turning into _Wonder Woman_.”

“Excuse me, have you seen what the Greeks did to their economy?” Lydia demands, piqued.

That makes Stiles laugh again. Scott makes a face. “I’m thinking – maybe we should talk to Derek and – and, um, the pack sooner rather than later.” He stumbles over _Peter_ , doesn’t say it, and she wants to punch him again.

She wants to say, _You don’t have to do that_ , and say it sharply, so it sticks with Scott, that she can hear Peter’s name and see his stupid face at Safeway and not cut herself or whatever awful, boring thing it is people do with their feelings nowadays. But then Scott would be confused (can’t you just hear him missing the point?) and Stiles would have to clarify, and Lydia’s been down that road too often for it to hold any appeal.

“Great,” Stiles sighs, when Lydia doesn’t say anything. “We have to go over to Casa Hale and talk to Hamlet and Claudius. Tell me Isaac’s going to be there, at least.”

Scott looks uncomfortable. “I think my mom’s teaching him to make lasagna tonight, actually,” he says, looking up at the house. “When she gets home from her shift.”

“Great. Awesome. That’s just so freaking wholesome,” Stiles mutters.

“Hey, though,” Scott says. “Can you guys wait for a second?” Without waiting for them, he jogs over to the edge of the yard, where he stands completely still, his back to them.

“What in God’s name is he doing?” Lydia asks Stiles.

“Fetching?” Stiles guesses.

“Don’t be a jackass, Stiles!” Scott yells. He walks back over, looking annoyed. “I was – Lydia, you didn’t hear anything I said after I walked away, right?”

“Um, no,” Lydia says. “I’m not an _amateur_ ,” she adds, though at what, she’s not sure. “I would have mentioned being able to hear through walls or whatever.”

“So, super-hearing: No check,” Stiles says. “Can you smell who touched me in fourth period?” She stares at him for a full thirty seconds, and he wilts. “What, Scott can!”

_Boys._

 

xii. 

She goes home, leaving Scott and Stiles to their well-worn Goofus and Gallant routine. It's a funny feeling, wishing her mom was going to be there, but she tells herself not to be pathetic; one day her mother will be someone she calls once a month, someone who attends graduations and sends expensive gifts and writes emails about her newest client. Someone she sees twice a year and smiles at, in the way that successful adults smile at other adults who haven’t done so well.

One day, her mother won’t make her feel weak or small.

She makes a salad, cuts pieces of strawberries into it with one hand. She takes Prada for a walk around the neighborhood, telling her what a good girl she is when she tries to protect Lydia from their neighbor’s fluffy piece of shit Persian.

Nothing happens on the walk, but when she gets back, there is another envelope at the door. Anger climbs its slow way up her spine as she bends to pick it up, and Prada snuffles at her ankle, making a little mark on the leather. She tears the side off, not bothering with the glued flap, and the crucifix and the note drop into her palm.

 _Lydia,_ (the note reads)  
 _Things are going to get very complicated for you very soon. This will give you some small measure of safety.  
_ _A friend_

Lydia’s friends don’t leave her confusing, cryptic notes. Lydia’s friends mostly wouldn’t know how to leave her confusing, cryptic notes.25

[(25) If it had come from Allison, she’d have dotted the i’s with hearts or some godforsaken thing; Stiles’s note would have been fifteen times longer; and Scott, even when he was leaving a creepy anonymous letter, would most likely have forgotten by the end and just signed his name. And Jackson, of course, isn’t leaving her notes anymore.]

Lydia’s been getting practice, this year; practice at humility, at humiliation, at rage. It’s the last that ignites somewhere deep in her spine, hard and hot against the cold night: It works its way through her lungs, up her face, coloring her cheeks with indelicate red.

“I don’t like being used,” she says, aloud, her voice thin and tinny in the vast wide world outside her home. It hangs in the more-or-less silence of the street, until the wind rises and blusters through her hair and blows it away.

Prada, at her toes, whines, and she opens the front door to go inside.

This time she keeps the note, and the necklace, tucking them into the pocket of her Alexander McQueen coat. She tells herself that she’ll show them to Allison the next morning, but eventually she gives in and sends a photo to Stiles instead.

He texts her back a few minutes later. _cool necklace_ , he says. _showed it to derek he said it looked like something from a catholic vending machine, do you think those exist, maybe in the vatican or japa._ A few moments later, he adds: _n and scott’s going to ask his abuela._

She lets herself smile, because – it’s not right, actually, to encourage Stiles to think he’s in love with her, but she thinks if he ever gets over that they could be friends. He knew enough to know to tell her he saw it, and Scott saw it, and even super-creeper Derek Hale saw it; he knew to bring it back down to reality for her.

 _Thanks_ , she writes back, briefly, and wants to write more, but doesn’t know what.

She thinks about texting Jackson, but the thought sours to dust. She just plugs in her phone and sets her alarm, instead.

 

xiii.

That night, Lydia dreams about falling.

 

xiv.

School feels – different. She has a guidance appointment with Ms. Morell26, which is perfect after a night spent in restless repose, falling from fucking scaffolding. She can still feel gravity pulling on her limbs, dropping her stomach.

[(26) Every Tuesday morning, 9am sharp. That damned first period spare had turned into a fabulous excuse to put her in the guidance office for fifty minutes every week. So far they have covered as little territory as Lydia can get away with.] 

She may, possibly, be in a bad mood.

Isaac Lahey is there, too. He has dark circles under his eyes. “This is my appointment time,” she tells him primly. She wants to add something cutting about doggy day-care or something, but she can’t quite bring herself to do it.

He shrugs. “I’m usually Fridays,” he says. “They pulled me out of first period.”

“I’m so glad the mental health professionals at this school have such excellent time management skills,” she says, examining her cuticles. “How was the lasagna?”

He blinks. “Good. Do you know everything?” he asks, mouth quirking.

“I don’t know why you’re choosing to associate with someone who murdered a bunch of people and spent the better part of three months fucking with my head,” she says pleasantly. “But I can understand lasagna." 

He wilts. She doesn’t feel bad for Isaac – she _doesn’t_. So his dad locked him in a freezer; so kanima Jackson (Matt) killed his dad; so he’s an orphan and forced to interact with Derek and Peter Hale on a daily basis. Your parents and parental figures mess you up. That’s what they do. It’s not Lydia’s problem.

They sit in silence (she suspects Isaac would classify it as _awkward silence_ , but until you’ve returned to school after spending two days naked in the woods, you don’t really understand the nuances of awkward silences) until the guidance office door opens.27 She says, “Lydia, if you don’t mind, I need to ask Isaac a few questions before our appointment.”

[(27) Isaac is reading _On the Road_ , which Lydia disdains as pedestrian. She’s looking through her Physics notes – which are not for class, but rather from the correspondence she’s struck up with a graduate student in Fresno who’s looking into electromagnetic fields. His work may have some werewolfy applications. She does not, however, share this with Isaac, who as far as she knows is lucky to get a D in any science class he takes.] 

“By all means,” Lydia says. “It’s not like I have anything else I could _possibly_ be doing.” Ms. Morell gives her a look, and when the door opens a little bit more, Lydia can see the Sheriff standing there, looking grim.

Finally, Isaac escapes – he does a funny little hop-run thing, too, like he really can’t wait to get out of there – and Ms. Morell stands in the doorway. “Come in, Lydia. The Sheriff’s wondering if he can ask you some questions, too.”

“Can I have my lawyer present?” Lydia asks, standing so she can cross her arms without looking like a third-grader in the principal’s office. (Actually, this is reminding her strongly of the time she had to own up to punching Stiles in the vice-principal’s office at Beacon Hills elementary, except his mom had been there too, in a deputy’s uniform that matched Mr. Stilinski’s.)

“Your parents have already given their permission,” Ms. Morell says. She actually rolls her eyes, which does nothing to discourage people from remembering she's actually just a French teacher.

“I’m glad all of the adults in my life are concerned about my rights as an American citizen,” Lydia says, but she walks, breezes, past Ms. Morell. “Good morning, Sheriff,” she adds, politely.

He tilts an ironic little smile in her direction. “We’re just wondering if you’ve seen Erica Reyes or Vernon Boyd lately,” he says, rather than going through any kind of preamble. She appreciates his straightforwardness, how he doesn’t treat her like she’s breakable – and he _saw_ her, coming out of that forest.

“I thought they ran away,” Lydia says, shrugging. “You know, to the circus or a meth lab or something.” Or to join a pack somewhere far, far away from the clusterfuck of Derek Hale’s. She wishes them all the best, so long as they stay the hell away from her. 

Sheriff Stilinski sighs. “We’re just following up on a few leads,” he says.

“They weren’t my friends,” Lydia says simply. “I only had one class with Erica.” None with Boyd. What year was he in, anyway?

“Thanks for your time, then,” he says. “Let us know if you see or hear anything from them, okay? I’m glad to see you’re doing better.” And he _means_ it, which is – it’s not something she’s going to react to, actually. But she gives him a smile, even if it is tight and uncomfortable.

“I think Mr. Choudhury is waiting for you in the main office, Sheriff,” Ms. Morell says. “Let me know if I can help at all.”

“Thanks,” the Sheriff says. If he had a hat, he’d tip it. Lydia wonders what it’s like to have a dad like that.

“So,” Ms. Morell says, once the door’s closed. “Do you think your civil rights survived that exchange?”

Lydia, perched on the edge of her seat with her spine straight, shrugs. “I just don’t know what he was asking me for,” she says. “I didn’t know either of them. Besides, they’re probably nestled cosily in a tent city by now.”

“And how have you been doing?” Ms. Morell asks, changing the subject.

“Fine,” Lydia says.

“Sleeping all right?” she pursues.

“Like a baby,” Lydia says.

“People always say that. Babies don’t actually sleep that well, do they?”

“It’s a common colloquialism,” Lydia says. “It means I’m sleeping fine. Great, actually. Full REM cycles every night.”

“Glad to hear it.” Ms. Morell leans back in her desk chair; it squeaks a little bit. “We’ve been seeing one another for a while now.”

“Do you want my class ring?”

“I want you to think about why we’re still at this.” Ms. Morell’s eyes are dark, serious.

“My mother thinks it will help me come to terms with what happened with me,” Lydia says, shrugging. “I pick my battles.”

“ _Is_ it helping you come to terms with what happened to you?”

“I’m fine,” Lydia says.

“What happened to you, Lydia?”

“Pardon me?”

Ms. Morell shrugs. “If you’re fine, you should be able to tell me what happened to you; who hurt you? Why did you leave the hospital that night? What happened in algebra last semester?”

“I was bitten by a wild animal,” Lydia says evenly. “Everything else was post-traumatic stress.”

“That’s what your file says,” Ms. Morell agrees.

“That’s because that’s what happened,” Lydia says. “I didn’t realize you weren’t up to date on the file.”

“I wrote the file,” Ms. Morell says, raising an eyebrow. “That doesn’t mean I’m convinced that you're okay.”

“I’m not sure what I’ve said to give you any reason to doubt my mental acuity,” Lydia says frigidly. “Maybe you’ve been a little busy teaching the _passé composé_ to freshmen.”

Finally, Ms. Morell sighs, and tucks her long shiny hair behind her ears. “You’re a very smart girl, Lydia. Smarter than your friends; smarter than your teachers. You’re pretty. You have a comeback for everything – I’m not complaining. It’s a nice change of pace, actually. You know that you’re an extraordinary girl. You have a bright future ahead of you.”

“Thanks,” Lydia says.

“So I’m wondering,” Ms. Morell continues, eyes on Lydia’s face, unflinching. “You have all of that going for you, all those things that nobody else around you does, and you’re still unhappy. I suppose I just find myself wondering why.”

Lydia’s jaw tenses, words clawing their way up, but the bell rings before she can say anything.

“I guess that’s all we have time for this week,” Ms. Morell says. “Sorry about the short session. See you next Tuesday.”

Lydia goes to Chem thinking, furiously: _I am not unhappy._

 

xv.

 

Derek Hale is waiting by her car after school; he’s probably been waiting for a while, since she spent an extra hour in the library writing up a Bio lab with Allison. The parking lot is mostly empty. Derek looks pained (or constipated), but that’s almost as normal for him as stalking high school sophomores.

He’s alone.

“Stiles and Scott seemed to think there was something going on with you.”

“And you thought I’d be in a big freaking hurry to tell you all about it? Really?"

Derek has his _God save me from teenagers_ face on, which is pretty ridiculous, considering that he bit three and keeps trying to add a fourth to his little werewolf family. “We could help. Peter – “

“Don’t talk to me about Peter.” Her voice is cool and unhurried, but that spike of rage in her spine comes back hotter than ever.

He’s quiet. He doesn’t say that he’s sorry, or that he didn’t mean anything, or anything like that. She watches his face, but he’s good at keeping his feelings to himself; almost as good as she is. “This could be bigger than all that,” he says after a moment. He reaches for her elbow, and she –

Well, in a moment she has him pinned by his throat against the PT Cruiser (Finstock’s) next to her Civic, and his eyes are flashing red and dangerous and his fingers lengthen into claws before he swallows and they turn back into fingers. She can feel the movement of his throat under her hands. “Let’s not escalate this,” he says, his voice lower, almost a growl.28

[(28) How stereotypical.]

She takes a breath. Lets him go. She thinks she sees bruises on his skin, but they fade so quickly that they might have been shadows. They stare at one another; her pulse, so calm just a minute ago, beats hard in her wrists and chest.

She says, “Stay the _hell_ away from me.” Her voice sounds far away to her own ears.

He says, “We might not have that option.” His jaw is set.

“We have that option,” she tells him, furiously, feeling like she might cry - later, anyway. “It’s our only option. I am _not_ part of your pack. Of the three of you, and don’t ask me how that constitutes a pack, there is only _one_ of you I am reluctantly willing to share space with, and it is not you or your crazy uncle. I’m not going to be the one hallucinating in math class again. Do you understand? Can you use whatever minor gifts of intellect you have to comprehend that I am _not_ willing to play nice with people who think it’s perfectly all right to screw with my sanity?”

“I _didn’t_.” Derek looks furious himself, but his eyes stay green. “I wouldn’t.”

“Your uncle did, and from all accounts the two of you are sharing a cosy abandoned public works project now.”

“That’s – complicated.”

“I’m sure it’s very complicated for you; it’s not like he killed your sister and bisected her body or anything.” Derek’s eyes flash red again, just for a second, and she takes a sick kind of terrified pleasure in getting to him the way that Peter’s presence gets to her. “I, on the other hand, have boundaries.”

“What’s happening to you – “

“- is, beyond whatever useful information you might be able to give Scott or Stiles, _none of your business_.” She meets his eyes. She won’t be afraid of Derek; she will think of him as a sad twentysomething who hangs out with teenagers exclusively, not a mythical creature with the ability (and the will, by now at least) to tear her throat out with his teeth. “We aren’t friends. We don’t share a lupine pack bond of any kind. The only thing you’ve ever done for me is hang out with the guy who did his best to make me lose my goddamn mind, and quite frankly things are going to get out of hand if I have to keep telling you to leave me alone.”

But Derek doesn’t growl. He doesn’t step back into her personal space. He looks – she thinks, for a second, that he looks unhappy, but his face hardens. “Things are getting out of hand _already_ ,” he says. “What’s happening to you isn’t even the worst of it.”

More cryptic werewolf bullshit. She shakes her head. “Stay away from me,” she tells him, roughly, hitting the unlock button on her key fob. He shakes his head and walks away.

She gets in and sits with her hands gripping her steering wheel for a few minutes, breathing through her nose. She is not going to cry in her car in the Beacon Hills High School parking lot; she is not going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her break down. She can hear the whispers in the hallways and she knows that nobody is talking about her fabulous new boots (although they should be). She is not going to live out the rest of her high school days as the crazy one, like Bella Peretti last year who tried to cut her wrists in the bathroom at a party. If she has to exist on the periphery of high school life for a while, she is more or less resigned to that as a consequence of dealing with supernatural entities. But – to be visible and pitied is so much worse than just invisible. She’s had enough of that.

When she finally has enough presence of mind to start the engine, she looks up to see Jackson standing on the steps. He looks like he’s watching her.

She drives home hating him, hating Derek Hale, hating everyone.

 

xvi.

That night, after she says good night to her mother, she dreams that she is drowning, a cold hand on the back of her neck.

 

xvii.

 

She wakes up very early the next morning, two hours before her alarm is due to go off. It’s outside, still dark, but something feels – wrong. Something is twisting her stomach and pushing adrenaline through her veins.

The house is quiet; so’s the street. She can’t hear or see anything strange. That doesn’t stop her from sliding out of bed, shushing Prada (who sleeps curled up against Lydia’s side, some nights), slipping her phone into the back pocket of her pajamas, and grabbing Dad’s hunting knife from the top of her dresser.29

[(29) She doesn’t even know why he owns a hunting knife, since the only time he goes hunting is for corporate retreats every two or three years, but that just means he won’t miss it.]

The knife’s heavy.

Her mom’s door is still closed. She steps carefully on the stairs, avoiding creaks. She feels cold; it’s so early that the thermostat hasn’t turned the heat up for the day. (Maybe that’s not the only reason she feels chills prickling her shoulder blades, but it’s the only one she plans on accepting.)

The house gets a lot of natural light during the day, and at night there’s enough from streetlights to make your way down and through the front hallway without incident. She looks around, a little wildly, and wonders if she really is cracking up; if all of this, every single second of the last five days, has been a product of her imagination. It reminds her of the feeling of freefall from her dream on – was it Monday? It seems like a long time ago.

She steps into the front room and stops abruptly.

There are people on the front lawn. Five, six – she counts seven figures, in groups of three and four, silhouetted by the streetlamp at their backs. They’re facing her, and she can’t see their faces.

They’re _in front of her house_.

It hasn’t really been that long since she’s been this scared; somehow, it doesn’t make it easier. They haven’t seen her yet – she isn’t visible from the window, she’s still in front of the front door – but she feels frozen in place. She gropes for her phone, but they’ll see the light if she turns it on, and who would she call? Who _could_ she call? Allison and Scott and Stiles, three against seven? (Four, if you count her; four, if she could imagine breathing or speaking or moving.)

She doesn’t know how to fight, not really. She can throw a punch, and maybe surprise Derek Hale, but the cold, hard truth is that if these things are werewolves – or vampires, or _whatever_ – then she is standing twenty feet away from dying an awful, grisly death, the kind in a horror movie that you feel for an hour afterward – a splintered-bone, rent-flesh kind of death. She knows about those; she’s seen enough of them in her stress nightmares this week. 

Eventually, she sinks to the floor; not out of weakness, but to get herself out of sight, in case they move, change their lines of sight. She moves as slowly as she can to sit with her back against the front door, knees pulled up to her chest.

She spends the time until sunrise with anger building deep in her stomach. When she sees the first sign of grey dawn filtering across the floor, she stands, face burning, heart stuttering; they’re gone. She flings open the door, full of stupid daylight bluster, but the yard is cold and empty, frost tipping the grass.

She has to turn back to the house to see what they left: A symbol spray-painted on the door; a triangle, three spokes extending outward, the tips jagged and angled. The paint is still wet enough to be tacky when she touches it.

They’re gone, but they were there.

They came to her _house_.

 

xviii.

The Sheriff’s Department sends a cruiser over when her mother discovers the vandalism. The neighbors come out to see what the fuss is, and her mother spends half an hour on the phone with her contractor. “We might as well replace that door now anyway,” she says, “I’ve been wanting to redo the entrance,” and Lydia shrugs and gets ready for school.

She stares at her reflection: Pale skin, three freckles on her nose, hair that needs styling or product or both. What the hell is she supposed to do now?

After a minute or two, she calls Allison and says, “Want to skip today?”

Allison, who is kind of a saint but not so much that she objects to skipping class (at least ever since Scott indoctrinated her, and who said Scott couldn’t do anything right?), says, “Sure.”

Lydia says, “Tell Stiles and Scott,” and says goodbye. Downstairs, she tells her mother not to forget to call the school about her doctor’s appointment (Mom waves in understanding, still on the phone), and makes herself a double espresso, which she drinks before she leaves. Business as usual.

She looks at the lawn to see if she can find any clues, but there aren’t any, of course. Nothing overtly trampled; no calling card. It’s just grass. She remembers to take a picture of the door so she can show it to her crack team of supernatural detectives (oh, God), and then drives to the diner forty minutes outside of Beacon Hills. It’s small and a little dirty and you wouldn’t skip school just to go there for fun, but they have good coffee and better pie (homemade), and they don’t care if you’re too young to be off your leash during the day.

 

xix.

“The thing is,” Stiles says, waving his third cup of coffee perilously close to Allison’s face, “ – sorry, Al – the thing is, I don’t think she’s turning into a werewolf.”

“I’m thinking that ship sailed too,” Allison agrees, chin cupped in her hand. “She didn’t get bitten again, and she can’t hear or smell anything better than I can.” Lydia is sure she should be offended by the suggestion that she is somehow normal, but she can’t figure out why, so she lets it slide. “So what is it?”

“Maybe she’s a hereditary witch,” Stiles suggests.

“My dad said that usually involved more mysterious telekinesis murders.” Allison sighs at her pie, like the pie ever did anything to her. Lydia’s friends are ingrates. “And I think she’d also seem eviler.”

That gets her a dubious look from Scott _and_ Stiles. “How could we tell?” Scott asks, and Stiles kicks him. Lydia glares at both of them. “See?” he whines in Allison’s direction, but they’re broken up; Allison is on Lydia’s side.

“Shut up,” she tells him, but she’s trying not to smile.

Lydia sighs. “Stiles,” she says, “I know _you_ met my mom, because she never stops talking about that time you brought us soup when I was sick.” Stiles flushes. “Does she seem like someone with an overabundance of mystical wisdom to you? Evil or not?”

There’s a pause while Stiles thinks about that. “Not so much,” he admits.

“So,” she says, “Let’s go ahead and assume that I am not a hereditary witch.” 

Fifteen minutes later, they’re all sort of staring at their coffee.

“Maybe we should talk about that thing on your door,” Stiles suggests, “Since obviously whatever higher being you’re evolving into isn’t on our supernatural roll-call list.”

“At least she’s not turning into a scaly venom murder monster,” Scott points out, and it is a sad sign of how far she has fallen that it’s actually comforting.30

[(30) Although it reminds her of Jackson, and that makes her have to sit up straighter and think about something else.]

“I sent the picture to my dad,” Allison says. “He sent me a text saying he was going to look into it, but he’s got a meeting with the San Francisco PD acquisitions committee today, so he might not get a chance.”

“I’ll tell you what it looks like to me,” Stiles says. “Derek’s tattoo.”

“That swirly thing?” Scott asks.

“What tattoo,” Lydia says, almost at the same time. She trades a look with Allison. “How do you guys know about Derek’s tattoo, and does it really look like this thing?”

“That guy hates shirts almost as much as sentences,” Stiles says gloomily. “There’s probably nobody at the creepy abandoned transit station hideout to appreciate the results of his finely-honed chest-waxing routine. Except Isaac.”

“Don’t put that on Isaac,” Scott says, appalled. “He’s been through enough as it is.”

That makes Allison snort coffee through her nose, which makes Lydia burst into semi-hysterical laughter. People turn and stare. She can’t stop laughing, though, and Allison’s eyes are streaming while she tries. “What?” Scott demands.

“Nothing,” Allison says finally, coughing and holding a paper napkin over her face, which is red. “Don’t worry about it. Sorry, did I get coffee on your shirt? I think I have a Tide-to-Go pen in my bag.”

Scott is not distracted. “Seriously, what?”

“Dude,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes, “You totally compared being witness to Derek’s OCD man-grooming to being locked in a basement freezer.”

“I did not!” Scott protests. He wilts under Stiles’s stern eye. “I didn’t mean to! I meant – you know what I meant!” Allison is hiding a grin under her hand, because she is weak.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Lydia says, “tell me about the tattoo. It looks like this?” She wields the phone closer to Stiles’s face, just to make him make that confused kitten look.31

[(31) Her life seriously lacks amusement these days.]

“No,” Stiles says. “I mean, sort of, but it’s a classic triskele. People usually think it’s Celtic, but there’s actually a lot of evidence pointing toward a pre-Celtic origin – ow! Okay, okay, I’m getting to the point, no need for kicking, a bruised Stiles is a distracted Stiles, yes, there’s a difference, shut up, Scott. _Anyway_. It represents a trinity – you know, spirit-mind-body, or past-present-future. It’s about cycles, or action, or especially movement.”

“So the tricycle symbol without the spiral parts means what?” Scott asks. 

“Triskele,” Stiles corrects him. “And I have no idea.”

“The middle looks weird, too,” Scott adds, consulting his own phone for a closer look. “It’s sort of like that’s the focus, not the spiral parts like Derek’s tattoo.”

Scott is not wrong, which is annoying. “Maybe it’s – like, a lone alpha,” Allison suggests, tugging at her thick braid thoughtfully. “You know, he lost his pack, or he never had one – “

“Why are we assuming it’s a _he_ ,” Stiles says. “I find that sexist. Reverse-sexist.”

“Reverse sexism isn’t sexism,” Lydia tells him severely.32 “Sexism is prejudice plus power.”

[(32) She has her feminist principles.]

“Fine, it’s just mean,” Stiles says, making a face at her, like he’s forgotten that she’s Lydia Martin. She kind of likes it, until he remembers and straightens up and the moment ends. “But it could be a lady alpha. Like Laura Hale.”

“It’s too bad our experience with normal packs is so limited,” Lydia says, sighing. “All we have are the Hales, and they’re about as typical as _Flowers in the Attic_.”

“I would avoid the incest allegations anywhere near Derek,” Stiles tells her, and she snorts.

The front window shatters inward a few seconds later.

Chaos spreads, like wildfire on gasoline, jumping from table to table to table. Their waitress drops a pot of coffee, which shatters on the tile floor; plates splinter, dropped from hands and tables. Lydia moves almost not quickly enough, blocking claws to her face and chest, twisting an arm and throwing someone up against the counter. Retro leather stools fall and clang and one hits her in the stomach, hard, but she manages to stay on her feet. Allison takes a hit to the face and swings out with a taser, but it glances off; then Scott and whoever it is are grappling, claws out.

The impression of red eyes flares hot in the frenzied air, obliterated by a blow to the face that she narrowly manages to redirect to her forehead. It stuns her, but she’s still moving. Somehow, her body knows what to do, even if there is a part of her – the part that sat stunned in front of a video store; the part that dream-walked through the forest to the Hale house – that is still frozen, neither fighting nor fleeing. That part is – distant, now.

The noise is amazing, overwhelming; it’s all she can do to keep up, to dodge a snarling mouth and land a knee in someone’s face. (She hopes it wasn’t Scott, but she can’t be sure.) She has to hiss and twist and yank to throw the figure coming at her across the room, and she doesn’t know what’s happening until everything stills and the noise dies down. The commotion has moved outside; she hears screams, sees people standing with hands over their mouths. Two or three people are laid out on the ground, but she can’t see if they are alive.

Their waitress is dead, though, her neck at an angle that makes Lydia’s stomach twist in horrified sympathy. She hasn’t noticed until now that the woman’s nametag said _Jolene_ ; she distantly wonders if she was named after the Dolly Parton song. What a terrible namesake.

There’s blood and coffee and pie and pancake syrup on the floor. The smell is nauseating, sticky-sweet, harsh and hot and metallic.

“Miss Martin,” says the woman she threw across the room, standing without difficulty. The table beside her is splintered and twisted, but she’s not even bleeding. “A pleasure.”

There’s liquid trickling down Lydia’s face. “Who the hell are you,” she says, through her teeth.

The woman smiles. She is tall and curvy, with broad strong hips and shoulders, and her hair is sleek and dark and shiny. “I’m Annie,” she says. “I just wanted to say hello before the fun got started, little slayer. I’m looking forward to this. We didn’t realize you’d be so young. Or that you’d have such interesting friends.”

Lydia swallows her sickness and fear and disgust. Her voice is light and high, and she says, tilting her head to Allison, “Is it just me, or is this whole crazy werewolf thing already really overdone?” (And just like that she can tell that Stiles is okay, just from his voice when he says, "No kidding," and the way he moves, scrambling up from the floor.)

“Completely passé,” Allison agrees, and her voice doesn’t even shake. She has a taser in one hand and she’s braced for action, feet wide. Something in the back of Lydia’s mind says, _She looks like a warrior_ , but how would Lydia know?

She says, “So was this whole murder rampage just a little teaser trailer for the movie we’ve already seen? Because quite honestly we have better things to do.” She tosses her hair, doesn’t wipe away what she thinks must be the blood sliding down her chin and dripping onto her chest.

“Oh, honey,” Annie says, smooth and sweet herself, like she hadn’t been a slobbering hell-beast just moments ago. Her coral lipstick isn’t even smeared. Scott’s head jerks to the side, like he hears something, and Annie’s smile widens. Her voice is liquid, like sticky-sweet vodka, like hot light on sunburnt skin. “We’re gonna put you through your paces, little girl. They weren’t kidding when they said you’d be fun.”

“And who are ‘they’?” Lydia grits out.

“Oh, just a few strays we picked up outside of town,” Annie says. “Don’t worry. We’re taking _excellent_ care of them.”

“Boyd and Erica,” Scott says, snarling, wolfed out again – or maybe he never shifted back in the first place. He’s the one Lydia doesn’t need to worry about.

“Boyd and Erica,” Annie sighs. “I love them, don’t you? Her eyes, his mouth. We’ve had a few interesting evenings with those two. The Beacon Hills pack was _never_ this exciting before.” Her smile is wide, generous, doesn’t look feral or malicious at all. She tilts her head to the side. “Well, that’s my cue to leave.”

And Lydia suddenly hears the faint wail of sirens. Annie sweeps out, ears and claws lengthening, and she steps on Jolene’s dyed-red hair on her way.

Lydia wants to shout, “Leave us alone,” but Annie just _did_. She wants to say, “Get the hell out of my home,” but they’re not in her home. (They were there, though. Her imagination provides Annie's sleek long hair and sturdy legs to one of the figures in her mind's eye.) She wants to scream and cry and lash out with her hands and feet and _teeth_ , until she gets some peace, but she is grown up, and she knows the secret of adulthood; there is no peace.

Instead, she tosses her hair, and gestures to the door. “Let’s get out of here,” she says, and they climb over broken glass and food and Jolene (Lydia is careful, careful, _careful_ to avoid her hair) and through the door hanging off its hinges into the parking lot.

 

xx.

Sheriff Stilinski is pissed. He was pissed when he picked them up from Trinity County General, where they’d ended up after the attack; he was pissed while he waited for them to make their statements at the Trinity country PD; he was pissed when they arrived at the Beacon Hills sheriff’s department; and he was pissed when he stuck them all in his office and told them to stay put, for God’s sake, he had to make some calls. 

They’re a mess; Scott is fine, but his shirt is ripped and his pants are ruined with what looks like gore and is actually the remnants of a strawberry-rhubarb pie. Allison has the beginnings of a black eye and a sore wrist. Stiles’s palms and elbows are raw from a bad fall. Lydia’s hair is in a ponytail – not a Pintrest easy-retro ponytail, just a plain step-below-gym-class ponytail – and there’s a long cut just under her hairline, over her right eye.33

[(33) Four stitches. Her mother had said, “Do you think it’ll show?” and her dad had told her to ask for an attending, _not_ a resident, his girl deserves the best.]

“I’m dead,” Stiles moans into his arms. He’s folded forward onto the Sheriff’s cluttered desk, hoodie askew. “I’m never going to see daylight again.”

“We were the victims,” Lydia reminds him. “Of a vicious, unprovoked attack.” She pauses. “By an unhinged spree killer we can’t identify,” she adds.

“Dead,” he repeats, shifting to balance his chin on his forearms. “He’s going to murder me with his disappointed face and serious talks about how he just wants me to be a good man like my mom would have wanted. I’m going to die of shame and I didn’t even do anything wrong. Except skip class, but I get straight As!”

“If that’s the criteria, maybe he should be killing Scott,” Lydia says crisply.

“Oh, God,” Scott says, belatedly horrified. “My mom’s going to kill me! I had a French quiz this morning.”

Since he helped keep everyone from getting disemboweled, Lydia silently resolves to tutor Scott on the conjugation of irregular verbs before his midterm. She learned French by watching CBC News in French, which doubled as research for a project she did on Canadian-American trade relations in the eighth grade.

“My dad’s not going to be thrilled either,” Allison says, frowning at the scuffed toes of her boots.34 “I’m probably going to get grounded again.”

[(34) Lydia sympathizes; her sweater is ruined.]

The door opens, and Lydia is saved from having to say her parents will be furious too. (They might be worried that there are a couple of stitches in her hairline, but she hasn’t been in trouble since she can remember.) The Sheriff’s face is grim.

Stiles doesn’t seem so funny, anymore. Lydia watches the silent interplay between him and his dad, the way Stiles avoids his eyes, and it strikes her how old the Sheriff looks when he looks at Stiles these days, old and careworn and desperate for safety. Her throat constricts. Nobody’s looked at her that way in her life.

“Your parents are coming,” he tells them finally. “I’m glad you’re all safe.” He puts a hand on Stiles’s head, his neck, gentle, checking him over for the fifth time since the hospital.35 He sighs, brushing his hand over Stiles’s hair. Stiles looks miserable but comfortable in his misery, resigned to his little betrayals.

[(35) Of course Lydia’s been counting. She’s fascinated by this rare display of functional familial affection.]

It’s a few minutes before Mr. Argent arrives. He’s obviously flustered, papers under his arm, panic in the lines around his mouth and eyes. “Allison,” he says.

“Hi, Dad,” she says, and he pulls her into a quick, fierce hug.

“I’m glad you’re okay, you escape artist,” he tells her, and she smiles a wavery little smile at him. “Let’s get you out of here. Lydia,” he adds, “Come for dinner this weekend. Allison said your mom’s been working a lot lately.”

“Sure,” she tells him, glancing at Allison, who shrugs; not a traitor, just an excuse.

They wait in silence for a while. Scott’s phone keeps pinging with texts, but, under Sheriff Stilinski’s stern eye, he doesn’t dare look at them.

Scott’s mom arrives, looking harried. “Scott,” she says. “Thank God. You’re okay.” She leans down to check anyway, capable nurse’s hands seeking him out – and she knows he’s a werewolf, that he’s fine, so she’s a _great_ actress; she’s looking at his pupils and checking his hair. She looks genuinely worried. She looks up at the Sheriff. “Thanks,” she says, her voice wavering on a note Lydia can’t place. “Thanks for looking after him, as usual.”

His smile is wry. “Thanks for patching Stiles up all those times,” he says, and she leans up to kiss him on the cheek.

She and Scott leave, so it’s just Lydia and the Stilinskis left. She pulls the sleeves of her sweater over her fingers so that she won’t fidget with her broken nails. She’s been meaning to file them down anyway, since she has decided that the nail art trend is beneath her notice. Short and simple, like Coco Rocha.

Half an hour later, the Sheriff stands up, putting aside the files he’d been going over (or, maybe, just pretending to; she’s noticed him glancing up at Stiles too often to really be focusing). “Lydia,” he says, “I’m going to try your parents again. Your mom said they’d be here, but – “

“It’s okay,” she says. “I can wait out front if you guys want to go home. They’re just – late.” She smiles. “It can’t be genetic, because my punctuality is legendary, but neither of them can be trusted to show up when they’re supposed to. I’m sure they just got caught in traffic.”36

[(36) “Traffic”, in Beacon Hills, is an extra ten minutes at lights on the main drag from 5:15 to 6:05pm. She knows because she did a project on traffic patterns for an online class she took last summer.]

“We don’t mind waiting,” Stiles says, and for once he doesn’t say it like he’s hoping she’ll realize he’s her soulmate. He just says it like he doesn’t mind waiting, and his dad nods and sits back down.

Another fifteen minutes tick by – she’s more conscious of them now – before she hears her mother’s unmistakable voice in the hallway. “– that this happened because I’m not supervising her properly, you are more than welcome to petition the judge for primary custody, but I’d like to remind you what happened the _last_ time – oh, hello, Sheriff.” Her mother is flushed and out of breath, and her dad is red-faced. “Oh, _Lydia_ ,” she says, and something in her voice makes Lydia want to leave. “Your poor face.”

“Tough luck, kiddo,” Dad says uncomfortably, leaning in to hug her briefly. He kisses her cheek. “We’re going to have to talk about this playing hooky with lacrosse players thing,” he adds, trying to be stern, but it’s just uncomfortable, an act they’re all putting on.

“Not now, Richard,” Mom says, almost snaps, sanding off the edges as she goes.  “Let’s get you home, sweetheart,” she adds, and it’s mean because she means her home, not Dad’s.

She says, “Okay,” and then, “Thanks for waiting,” to Stiles, who lifts a hand.

“Thanks for the pie, as a last meal it wasn’t so bad,” he says, and she smiles and leaves between her parents, bracketed by their height and age and the conversation they’re having about limits. She’ll never see the results of it, so she tunes it out until she’s hugging her dad goodbye and slumping into the passenger seat of her mom’s Rav-4.

“I was just feeling tired,” she explains on the drive home. “I just thought – why not take a day off, you know?”

Her mother looks fond. “Next time, tell me,” she says. “Believe me, I understand needing a break. We can do a spa day. That way, you won’t be pulling kids who need to be there out of class, and we can spend some time together.”

“That sounds great,” Lydia says. She knows it will never happen, but if your parents can’t be unhappy and worried about you, if they can’t check you over for broken bones or ground you for getting caught in a violent murder situation when you should be in third period, at least they can have good intentions.

Her parents have good intentions. Lydia knows that. They aren’t bad people. They’re just not that emotional.

It’s the last time they discuss the topic. Her mother orders Indian for dinner, and Lydia finds the Polysporin in the medicine cabinet in her bathroom so that she can reapply it before bed.

She looks at her face in the mirror and tells herself what she tells herself when things get bad: _Two more years_. It sounds stupid, but it works; she feels certainty weighing down all the questions and confusions she’s had for days, weeks, months. She looks at herself – she is small, with sharp elbows, full lips, honey-hazel eyes – and feels like a stranger.

It’s easier to ignore it when her head isn’t throbbing with stress. Since when can she stand up to a werewolf?

Annie had called her _little slayer_. It sticks in her mind because it’s so awkward; it sounds like a proper noun, not an epithet. She’s only ever killed one thing; and she didn’t mean to.

She uses cold cream to take her makeup off and brushes her hair until it’s smooth. Tomorrow she’ll use her index finger to hide the bruisey shadows under her eyes, and highlight the inside corner of her eyes, and she’ll look like herself again.

 

xxi.

That night she tosses and turns and can’t sleep. At 2:37, her phone buzzes, harsh and loud in the still night. It’s an unknown number.

She answers it anyway, contrary in the face of her fear – call it caution, rather. “Hello?”

“Lydia, it’s Ms. Morell,” the voice says, smooth, feminine. The sound shocks through Lydia’s stomach unpleasantly. “I thought we could talk, if you’re awake.”

“Our sessions,” Lydia says pointedly, “are on Tuesdays.”

“Do you think I’m calling you at two in the morning about our sessions?”

“I have no idea why you’re calling me at two in the morning. How did you get this number?”

“It’s in your mobile technology contract,” Ms. Morell says. “You signed it at the beginning of the year.”

“So you’re misappropriating school resources to harass me outside of school hours,” Lydia says flatly. “I’m sure Vice-Principal Choudhury would be thrilled to hear about this.”

“I’m sorry about the hour.” She doesn’t _sound_ sorry. "Unfortunately, we have some business to discuss."

Lydia feels too tired to be careful, so she says, "Is this the kind of business that involves werewolves, by any chance? Because if you have some insights on that, I'm  _fascinated."_

“Meet me at the animal hospital,” Ms. Morell says, like Lydia hasn’t even spoken. "As soon as you can."

“The _animal hospital_?” Lydia asks. “Are you serious?” There’s no reply; the line is silent. “Um, hello?” 

Ms. Morell has hung up on her, which might be a new personal low; dissed by a French teacher. Lydia’s not even sure if it _was_ Ms. Morell. It sounded like her, but she has a shaky truce with her senses now, nothing more. It could have been anyone: Annie, Erica Reyes, Aunt Kate back from the dead, why not.

It could be Peter Hale, reaching out to nudge her temporal lobe into a series of meaningless lies.

It could have been no one. It could be something wrong with her brain, something misfiring all on its own.

She turns on her bedside lamp, and gets dressed in the first thing she finds.

It’s always been her besetting sin; she wants to know, know, _know_.

 

xxii.

The lights are on at the vet’s when Lydia pulls up in front. It’s colder than it should be, this time of year; there’s even a thin promise of snow in the clouds. The other car has California plates, but a bumper sticker that says _Je suis fier de ne pas voter conservateur_. Someone has added an ‘e’ in Sharpie at the end of ‘fier’.

Lydia is distantly aware that her heart is thrumming, fast and consistent. Adrenaline, maybe. She closes the Civic’s door quietly, rocks back on her heels. She feels lightheaded. She feels awake. Her engine pops and cools in the silence, and she squares her shoulders, walks the short distance (it feels longer) to the door, and goes inside.

Dr. Deaton is behind the desk.

“Hello, Lydia,” he says.

“You’re working late,” she says, lifting her chin. “Do you get a lot of business after midnight?”

He raises an eyebrow. “In this town?”

Touché.

“Gen is in the back room,” he says gently, adding, “Ms. Morell. She’s waiting for you,” when Lydia looks – well, she must look confused, or suspicious, or stunned, because he’s reacting to whatever it is that’s on her face.37

There is a dead body in the back room. Lydia sees it – him – before she sees Ms. Morell; he is pale and fishy, naked (probably naked) under a sheet. Under the harsh fluorescents, he looks awful.

The only dead body she’s ever seen before is Peter’s.

At least this isn’t worse than that.

“Hello,” Ms. Morell says. Her voice is quiet. “I’m sorry that we haven’t had a chance to talk yet. How are you?”

“It’s three in the morning,” Lydia says, her voice cold and brittle like the glass panes in the windows out front, “this is a vet clinic, and that is a corpse. Let’s skip the pleasantries.”

“Lydia,” Ms. Morell says, a half-smile pulling on the corner of her mouth. “Calm down; I am sorry that we haven’t had a chance to talk about this before now, but it’s been busy. Did you get my note?”

She _is_ calm. “I got two anonymous notes with ugly jewelry attached,” she says evenly. “I don’t take things from anonymous sources, by the way. I’d think someone who’s responsible for minors would get that. Can we talk about the dead guy? Let’s talk about the dead guy.” She puts her car keys down with a clang on the bench.

“I should have been more sensitive,” Ms. Morell says. “Sorry about the notes. It’s sort of a – well, not really a tradition, but I didn’t have a lot of time, and we weren’t sure if it was really you or not.”

“If _what_ was really me?”

Ms. Morell continues, “I thought it was more likely it was Allison Argent – she has the pedigree – but Alan was sure it was you.”

“Do you need me for this conversation?” Lydia feels – not dizzy, but vertiginous, unstable. She doesn’t like it.

“Allison has her dad, but you were alone – and if it wasn’t you, well, there are things we don’t want everyone knowing, and there’s only so much we can interfere without drawing notice. Still, given your circumstances with Peter Hale, I do regret not finding another way." 

“Excuse me,” Lydia says. “Is this a werewolf thing? Is this you thinking that I’m going to join your little werewolf pack and participate in tiringly trite anthropomorphized wolf behaviors with you?”

Ms. Morell laughs. She has straight white teeth, and her hair, as usual, is shiny and long and sleek, perfectly styled. “I promise that this is not a werewolf thing,” she says. “And I promise that I have answers for you. But – here.” She tosses something at Lydia, and Lydia has to catch it or let it hit her in the face.

It’s a goddamned wooden stake. Just a big old pointy stick. She could have cut herself on this! She could get a splinter! Who knows where this thing has been –

The sound of movement on metal makes her tense all over, almost jump; she could have sworn that she just saw him move. The sheet is a little bit rumpled now; her eyes go to Ms. Morell’s face.

“This is Mr. Hanania,” Ms. Morell says.

“Is Mr. Hanania dead?” Lydia asks, her voice strained, stretched beyond her control.

“Yes,” Ms. Morell says.

An arm jerks. Lydia doesn’t move. She holds the stake in front of her, in one hand, like that’s going to make a difference in this situation. (Maybe she’s dreaming. She hopes she’s dreaming, that this is just another night where she will wake up with the ghost-feeling of another death in her body.)

“This used to be easier to tell,” Ms. Morell says. “It used to be that in every generation, one girl was born with a duty to fight the monsters that plagued humanity.”

On the gurney, shoulders roll.

“One girl, with the power – and a few other things – that she needed to protect people. Simple, right? One girl.” Ms. Morell sighs. “Things changed.”

Mr. Hanania sits up; looks around. His eyes fall on her, and his movements become smoother, like he's getting used to his joints again.

“What the _hell_ is going on,” Lydia says through her teeth, unable to raise her interrogative at the end.

“A while ago, someone realized that it would be easier to fight the forces of darkness if everyone who _could_ become that girl _did_. There were quite a few upheavals that year, but that one profoundly changed our world, and so few people will ever know exactly how much.”

The man – the body; God, he still looks dead, he looks _dead_ and it can’t just be the shitty lighting – swings his legs off the gurney. The sheet falls in a quick swish of fabric to the floor, exposing him. He is dead, and naked, and grotesque, his skin grey across his belly, his face, his hands.

She doesn’t expect him to be fast. He almost gets a hand around her throat, and all she can think is that she can’t stand for him to touch her; they tangle for a second, until she gets a knee in his stomach. His back hits the gurney, but he recovers faster than she imagines he will. His face looks ruined, bumpy, and his incisors are long and sharp.

He hisses. It’s not like a person imitating a cat; it’s an animal sound, one that reverberates all the way back to her reptile hindbrain and _sticks_ there.

“You know what to do,” Ms. Morell says calmly.

“What the _hell_ – “ Lydia says, before he’s on her again. He hits her in the chest, hard, and she reels for a second because it hurts. Worse than that, she can feel where his skin touched hers, the same feeling you might get when a cockroach runs over your foot.

Later, she’ll feel stupid for how long it took her to put it together. She’s supposed to be a genius, isn’t she?

But just then all she thinks is: _Oh._

When it’s over – when Mr. Hanania is just a thin layer of dust on Dr. Deaton’s examination room floor – Ms. Morell says, “Lydia, it’s my duty as a member of the Watchers’ Council to inform you that you have been chosen.”

“Chosen,” Lydia repeats, her eyes on the thin air where Mr. Hanania once stood.

“Chosen,” Ms. Morell says, “to be a vampire slayer.”

Huh.


	2. the deepest secret nobody knows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO, INTERNET. A few things. (a) This was not supposed to take four months. I swear! Frankly, writing this chapter has been ridiculous. I have excuses – so many, and some of them are even pretty good! – but mostly they boil down to the last part being ridiculously, insanely difficult to write. You don’t even want to know the psychic agony of finishing this chapter. I’m not entirely convinced it is finished; I might have just given up and left the hard part for chapter three; but in the interests of chapter three happening, I am letting it go. 
> 
> (b) I can’t even talk about how amazing your comments and feedback have been. So amazing! I love this fandom; you guys are the best. The most I can offer you for now is this chapter, and I am truly sorry for that. 
> 
> (c) Feel very free to lie if this is terrible.
> 
> (d) I have a Tumblr – my username is rememberyes – and I would loooove to have long, involved discussions there about Derek Hale’s shoulders and how Tyler Hoechlin is the most ridiculous person alive, and especially about how I really want to be Holland Roden so that I can have perfect hair. I mean, discussions involving other people, not just myself. Come be my friend! I don’t offer much in the way of content, but sometimes I reblog pictures of adorable animals or out-of-context comic book panels.

(before) 

He’s wearing clothes again; she found the pajama pants in the bottom drawer of his dresser, with about fifteen identical pairs of black socks.1 She sits on his bed and hands him a t-shirt that says _Beacon Hills High School_ on the front. He sits next to her and pulls it on, but he still looks naked. He looks naked, even though she can’t see her favorite parts of him: The jut of his hipbones, the knobs of his spine, the hard, awkward lines of his shins.

[(1) She knows that he wears the pajamas, although he always wanted her to think he slept in underwear, or naked; she knows he likes soft fabric, because in ninth grade they’d gone on an overnight school trip and she’d worn a cotton flannel shirt in the evening and he’d practically burrowed into her under the pretense of feeling her up.]

They don’t touch. Her hands are in her lap, and they might be shaking.

His parents are still downstairs, arguing about who they’re going to sue – the school, the paramedics, the hospital that told them he was dead, or maybe Stiles Stilinski, who disappeared directly after all this happened. Jackson has a restraining order against that boy for a reason, after all (they say). After a few minutes of that, Jackson had looked so sick that Lydia had taken him upstairs.

“How did you know to find me?” he asks. His voice is still rough; it scrapes its way out, quiet, meek, _not Jackson._ She wants to tell him to man up, to get over it, but then she thinks about really doing that and her heart hurts more than it has all night, more than it did when Stiles was yelling at her, more, more, more.

“They wouldn’t let me see you,” she says. Everything sounds – trite, but he hasn’t touched her since she got him home. Her chest hurts, and her hair feels dirty, and her voice feels small. “When you – after the game. I went to see Stiles. He knew – I think he knows about everything – and we ended up at that warehouse.”

“Do you know – I – “ Jackson looks a little lost; his voice sounds like he’s coming out of a h. “I’m a werewolf,” he says, “but – I kept having – by the end, I thought they were dreams. I – killed people, right? That’s what Scott was saying.”

“I don’t know _anything_ ,” Lydia says, with a burst of fresh, sharp anger that she tries not to direct at him, “but I know that you wouldn’t hurt anyone.”2

[(2) He did. She knows he did, but it wasn’t – that wasn’t him. It couldn't have been him.]

“I hurt you,” he says after a few moments of silence. She’s never heard him say anything like that before.

“ _No_ ,” Lydia says, but it’s a lie.

He looks over, right at her, and she has the sinking suspicion that he can tell.

 

i. 

It is four in the morning. Thursday, already. It’s been six days since she killed her first vampire, and an hour since she killed her second. They’re sitting in Dr. Deaton’s office, drinking hot mint tea that is almost too sweet.

“It made things harder, the spell,” Ms. Morell says, sipping her tea. She doesn’t look tired or pale, like Lydia thinks she must, and Lydia is envious. “It’s easy to identify the potential; the Watchers’ Council has spent thousands of years perfecting those methods. But all of that assumes that only one person at a time can be the Slayer. When everyone who could be one _becomes_ one – things get complicated.” She sighs. “We’ve always known that people develop their potential at different times in their lives, but that means that we don’t get everyone in one sweep. We have to keep checking, and the new spells are – for most of the people casting them, anyway – they’re not specific. They give us something, but it’s not usually enough.”

“Most witches don’t have enough power to do a really serious spell like that, either,” Dr. Deaton says. “The Watchers have to use more unreliable methods a lot.”

“There’s something _more_ unreliable than magic?”

“Seers,” Dr. Deaton says. She’s starting to resent the wise, gentle way he says things. “Portents, usually in entrails. Another Slayer having a prophetic dream. That kind of thing.”

“I don’t understand why supernatural beings can’t find portents in anything that isn’t a salmonella risk,” Lydia says.

“We’re actually human,” Ms. Morell says. “In general.”

“Then one would think you’d take motile enterobacteria more seriously.”

There is a silence; Lydia watches the steam curl over her mug.3 Ms. Morell breaks it by saying, “I guess I’m just trying to explain why we weren’t more straightforward with you. We weren’t sure – and we _had_ to be sure.”

[(3) It says WORLD’S BEST VET. Doubtful.]

“Before you put me in a room with an undead halal meat wholesaler?” Lydia clarifies. 

“More or less,” Dr. Deaton admits. Ms. Morell slants him a look; he tilts his head at her. Lydia can’t figure out the conversation they’re having with their eyes. “Do you remember what happened to Sunnydale in 2003? It was a little town, down south.”

“Some kind of seismic event,” Lydia says. “They’re still trying to figure out how a sinkhole of that size developed like that.” She’d read only recently that some of the evacuees had won a sizable settlement against the state, for negligence.

“It wasn’t a sinkhole,” Ms. Morell says. “Sunnydale collapsed because the Slayers there destroyed the Hellmouth under the town.”

Lydia rubs her eyes, feeling the adrenaline low. It’s hormonal, and she doesn’t have to be a slave to her adrenal gland, but she still feels the burn of exhaustion in her chest. “Excuse me?”

“A Hellmouth,” Ms. Morell says. “It’s a portal from our world to Hell. Well, _a_ hell.”

“ _The_ hell, for our purposes,” Dr. Deaton corrects her. “The pit, the hot place. Dante’s hell, more or less. Not that he didn’t take some pretty significant liberties. But yes; there are more hells out there. They’re just less interested in this plane of existence.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Beacon Hills is on top of one of these things?”4

[(4) Lydia can’t bring herself to say _Hellmouth_. It sounds like the name for a bad Christian metal band, the kind played in a garage, next to a late-model Nissan Sentra, by acne-pocked bible-bangers with nothing better to do. It sounds ridiculous, and she shouldn’t be buying this, but she is – or at least she’s putting down a down payment, a cautious belief.]

“Not at all,” Dr. Deaton says. “Until recently, Beacon Hills was off the map – mystically speaking, I mean. We’ve had a run of bad luck. That’s why I called Gen; she’s part of the Watchers’ network.”

“I thought it was a council,” Lydia interjects. “You said Watchers’ Council.”

“We had a lot of rebuilding to do when our leadership was murdered in 2002,” Ms. Morell explains. “That was – a bad year. We call ourselves the Council, but it’s nothing like it used to be.”  
  
“They have a Google Group now,” Dr. Deaton says wryly.

Lydia says, “Well, that’s exactly the kind of highly advanced technological innovation I like to see when it comes to vampire hunting.”

“We share information,” Ms. Morell says. “We’re trying to formalize again, but – there were a _lot_ of new Slayers all over the world, when the spell worked, and more and more every year since then. Making sure they were safe, that they knew what they were and what they were up against – that they weren’t being exploited – that had to be the priority.”

Lydia wants to say, _I’d like to see someone exploit me_ , but, well.

“Watchers aren’t really a formal thing anymore,” Ms. Morell adds. “I mean, we try to match one to every Slayer, but it’s more common now for Slayers to band together, or for several Slayers in the same region to have one Watcher. I spent three years in a car looking after six in Quebec before I came here.”

“Are you really Canadian?” Lydia asks. “I’ve wondered, because your French accent is pretty terrible.”

“I grew up in Penticton,” Ms. Morell says, and Lydia feels like she’s scored a point because Ms. Morell looks a little defensive. “It’s not a Francophone community. I majored in French in university, before I did my B.Ed.”

“So what brought you here?”

“Alan asked for my help,” Ms. Morell says. “He’d had word that someone’s potential was going to develop in this area – it was you, but we didn’t know that then – and there was an unusual amount of supernatural activity.”  
  
“You knew about all of that, and you didn’t think that maybe you should help out?” Lydia asks. “I mean, I’m sure you were really busy with the sick cats and test grading and everything, but quite frankly things got _really fucking out of hand._ ” She doesn’t realize how angry she still is until the words come out, unfiltered, unedited.

Dr. Deaton and Ms. Morell exchange looks again. If she were one of them, she’d be feeling sorry right now; sorry for being an inadequate adult, sorry for not solving these problems herself, sorry for everything. But she’s not, and she doesn’t know how they’re feeling, just that she’s pretty close to walking the hell out of here.

“I think,” Dr. Deaton says, “There are two problems we’ve been contending with on our end. The first is that I have a very limited capacity to act, for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that I can provide the best support to the community when I’m not being hunted myself. The second is that Watchers, even now, have a strong – ah, call it a professional imperative to stay out of the fight.”

“Hence the name,” Ms. Morell says. “We have a specialized skill and knowledge set that needs to be preserved. If everyone became a soldier, who would lead them?”

“So the rest of us are expendable,” Lydia says, “because there is a finite number of you and a theoretically infinite number of us. Especially if you include hapless teenage werewolves.”

“Yes,” Ms. Morell says.

“And there are a lot of these – people like me,” Lydia says, “who are also basically expendable, because of this spell that made so many of them and keeps making more.”

“Yes,” Ms. Morell says again.

At least she’s honest.

“And the more or less inept cloak-and-dagger act – the notes, I mean, if you need any clarification – that was your attempt to stay under the radar?”

The corner of Dr. Deaton’s mouth quirks wryly when Ms. Morell says, “Yes,” for the third time.

Jesus Christ. Suddenly she just feels tired – and _old_ – and, as usual, like she’s dealing with people below her paygrade. She doesn’t want to walk out; she just wants to go to sleep and wake up in college. But that’s a daydream, and it’s not even daytime yet, and her regular dreams haven’t been that great lately anyway, so she sighs and puts her hands around her mug, leeching the warmth out of the cup with her skin. “So,” she says, “What now? A training montage? _Eye of the Tiger_?” 5

[(5) What she wouldn’t give for a _ten years later_.]

“Well, I’d like to know more about the encounter at Twenty-Four-Seven yesterday,” Ms. Morell says. She means she diner, which nobody ever calls by its name, because it sounds ridiculous. It says 24/7 on the sign, but it’s only open Tuesday through Sunday, and it closes at 11 on the dot.6

[(6) She and Jackson had been kicked out of there once, a night when he’d had a fight with his dad and wanted to get away. She’d played footsie with him under the table, and flagrantly stolen his milkshake.]

“A werewolf attacked us,” Lydia says. “Her name was Annie. I’m pretty sure she was an alpha.” She remembers the muscles in Annie’s thighs, obvious even under denim, and the bright-hot-red flare of her eyes.7

[(7) She also remembers Scott’s voice, how different he sounded in this context – not like the slightly doofy kid she’d kissed to get back at Jackson, but someone in his element. Someone scared out of his mind, admittedly, but she remembers Allison watching him and feels a twinge of – well.]

“Disclosure time,” Dr. Deaton says, glancing at Ms. Morell. “Scott and Stiles will probably tell you later, if they’ve managed to talk to Isaac or Derek since yesterday. An alpha pack has migrated to this area.”

“An alpha pack,” Lydia says flatly. “I assume you mean a pack of werewolves consisting atypically of alphas rather than conforming to the beta/alpha hierarchy that the literature suggests is typical in werewolf groups.”

“Exactly,” Ms. Morell says. She sounds approving. “It’s rare – extremely rare – but it happens every once in a while. Usually it’s a sign that the mystical is seriously out of whack in a particular region.”

“Did we really need a sign for that?” Lydia asks.

“Not so much,” Dr. Deaton says. “Sometimes we get things we didn’t ask for.” Apparently Dr. Deaton is a comedian, but his face stays straight, so she doesn’t pursue it. He continues, “They’re the ones who left the symbol on your front door – actually, it’s a sigil. It told every magical being in a hundred-mile radius that you were – ah – well, I suppose it’s easier to put it this way. It’s a declaration of war.”

Lydia sips her tea. It’s better than screaming; quieter, too.

“They identified two people in Beacon Hills as threats,” Ms. Morell says. “You, of course; you’re a Slayer.”

“She called me _little slayer_ ,” Lydia says. She can’t bring herself to say it like Ms. Morell does, with a capital S; it sounds disturbingly like something from _The Vampire Diaries_. “I guess she thought I already knew.”

Dr. Deaton doesn’t look surprised, or happy. “It’s – unfortunate, yes. We think they have access to a witch with more power than we can access ourselves. If they were lucky, they might have been able to sort of – magically zoom in on you, especially if you were doing anything beyond what an ordinary teenage girl might be able to do.”

“Well, I killed a vampire last Friday,” Lydia says. “Don’t get excited. It was mostly an accident.” And this time it had been instinct. Next time, she was damn well going to _mean it._ “Was Derek Hale the other person they declared their little war on?”

“It was,” Ms. Morell says. “Alan saw the sigil on the front door of the old Hale house.”

“At least they’re going to be harassing _someone_ who deserves it,” Lydia says tartly.

Dr. Deaton frowns. “I know you’ve had your differences with Derek Hale, but – “

“Differences,” Lydia says flatly.

“He’s in a very difficult position right now,” Dr. Deaton says. He sounds – apologetic, maybe, but Lydia can’t tell why or for what or whom. “He’s a new alpha; his pack is splintering. Even from an instinctive standpoint – things aren’t good. Peter, because of the family bond, provides – stability. It’s not entirely a psychological support. Werewolves are extremely clan-oriented, psychically-speaking.”

Lydia sips her tea again. She thinks about the shower she’s going to have before school, hot water just short of scalding, Philosophy sugar-cookie-scented shower gel, the special Kérastase conditioner she uses when her hair just feels disappointing. She thinks about making a smoothie for breakfast, bananas and chocolate protein powder and vanilla Greek yogurt.

When she can’t think about anything else, she thinks about clawing her skin off with her fingernails.

“About his pack,” Lydia says eventually. “Little alpha Annie told us that Boyd and Erica had joined up with them.” It’s not the whole truth, so she feels like she has to add: “Well, they might also be hostages, or dead.”

“That’s – extremely unfortunate,” Dr. Deaton says, looking genuinely worried.

“If they’re targeting Derek Hale, they’ll use them as bait,” Ms. Morell says.

“Is it too much to hope that they all kill one another before I have to do anything?” Lydia asks.

Ms. Morell says, “Well, the unfortunate part about an alpha pack is that they can multitask pretty effectively. Depending on how many of them there are, they could easily defend against Derek while coming after you.”

“Werewolves, as designed by efficiency experts,” Lydia interprets. She taps her nails on the table, thinking. “How do they make decisions?” she asks finally. “If the normal instinct is to follow the leader, how do they circumvent it? I ask because Annie didn’t really seem like a consensus-building kind of werewolf.”

“There are a few options,” Dr. Deaton says. “The most likely is actually that they _are_ consensus-building werewolves.”

“The other,” Ms. Morell says, “Is that one of them is significantly more powerful than the others, and is leveraging that into a leadership position.”

“Is it just me, or is Slayer exposition hour getting more and more fun every time I ask a question?” Lydia asks, pushing her sleeves up to her elbows, because she finally feels warm, and that’s edging onto too-warm when Dr. Deaton refills her mug and she puts her hands around it again. The silver teapot tries to glint under the lights, but it’s muted, tarnished.8

[(8) Someone ought to tell him that silver needs to be polished more often. More to the point, what kind of vet keeps a silver teapot at the ready?]

It’s four in the morning. She’s already discovered that she has a supernatural destiny far surpassing Scott McCall’s minor lycanthropy problem. Her guidance counselor is actually someone who intends to watch her – _Watch_ her, mind your proper nouns – as she fights the forces of darkness (or whatever). There is a pack of alpha werewolves who apparently think she’s a threat to their territorial expansion (and they’re probably right, because if Beacon Hills is _anyone’s_ territory, it’s _hers_ ). Erica Reyes and Vernon Boyd0 are not just living in the comfort of a cardboard box, but might actually be in serious trouble.

[(9) Of course she knows his first name. She might not know him, but she knows Stiles, and he’s a font of descriptive but ultimately useless information.]

Lydia taps a fingernail on her cup. She exhales, and looks up at the ceiling, and lets her eyes lose their focus; it feels so good to relax her gaze that she almost closes them altogether.

“Drink,” Dr. Deaton tells her, gesturing at her mug. “The sugar’s good for shock.”

“It’s been a long night,” Ms. Morell adds generously, like she’s feeling sympathetic.

Lydia says, annoyed, “I’m not in _shock_. I’m _thinking_.”

 

ii.

She gets home around six, four minutes before her mother’s alarm goes off and her absence is noted.10 She doesn’t feel that bad, honestly; a little frayed around the edges, in desperate need of a shower, but not that bad. She brings in that morning’s _Trib_ and puts it on her chair at the kitchen table.

[(10) Not commented-upon; she’s been home a lot more often than she’s been out, lately, anyway. Her mother just notices things at the most inconvenient times, honestly. When she can gather sufficient feelings of motherly duty to care about something, they even fight over it. It’s dull and a complete waste of time.]

She makes a French press of coffee and leaves it to steep while she showers, since, as far as she’s concerned, it cannot be too strong. She scrubs her skin with lavender-scented exfoliant, and afterwards she rubs shea butter onto her legs and elbows and hips and stomach. She dresses with care, because it’s occurred to her that people will be looking again after yesterday, and her floaty little dress skims her knees. She chooses black tights and the motorcycle boots she still hasn’t returned to Allison.11

[(11) Allison needs to re-expand her wardrobe anyway. If you walk around looking like a hunter, someone’s going to figure it out; the element of surprise is more useful than a hundred on-the-nose fashion statements. Anyway, pale brunettes shouldn’t wear so much black. It’s too Winona Ryder c. 1994.]

She presses makeup onto her face with her fingertips, wraps sections of her hair around a hot curling iron again and again, and finally spritzes herself with Burberry Brit. Eventually she is just a redhead in a pretty printed dress with a big cup of coffee at her elbow while she reads the morning paper, and you can’t tell at all that she spends time with werewolves and vampires.

 

iii.

She spends the early morning before school starts texting Allison, Scott, and Stiles. She meets Allison at Starbucks before first period. Allison’s not a morning person, but Lydia is providing a much-needed excuse for her to duck her father’s tender ministrations, which apparently involved a raw steak at some point. Hasn’t the man ever heard of an ice pack?

“Ms. Morell?” Allison scrunches up her nose before she remembers that that’s going to really hurt for a while. “Shit. Ow. Seriously? She’s my French teacher.”

“Apparently Watchers need day jobs.” Lydia sips her triple soy half-sweet light-water Chai latte. “Also, better titles.”

“It’s kind of hard to imagine calling you _the Slayer_.” Allison drops her voice and says it like a dorky Transylvanian in a B-movie. “I mean, you’re pocket-sized.”

Lydia finds herself grinning, despite her resolution to be cool and distant in the face of her current tribulations.  “Because _hunter_ just rolls off the tongue when I think about you,” she counters, flipping her hair with a practiced hand-and-head toss. “I mean, between your Cookie Monster slippers – don’t think nobody noticed that they didn’t make the Allison Argent Goes Evil cull – and the little singing birds that do your hair every morning, you’re not exactly an obvious candidate for fighting the forces of darkness yourself.”

“Those birds are amazing at French braids,” Allison says, straight-faced. They both grin into their drinks.

“I think supernatural entities are pretty stupid,” Lydia says. “Apparently the whole backstory behind the Slayer thing comes down to a bunch of old guys chaining a cavewoman to the ground and fusing her soul with a demon’s – or something like that, anyway.”

“I don’t think we should let the demon thing get around,” Allison says after a moment. “You already have enough problems with people thinking you’re kind of evil.”

“Shut up,” Lydia says mildly, “or I’ll tell Scott about the slippers.”

“Scott _bought_ me the slippers,” Allison says. “He knows Cookie Monster is my favorite.” She smiles to herself. “He taped them to a pack of Golden Oreos, back when we were sneaking around, and he put it all in my backpack during gym.” She pauses, then looks appalled. “I think he had to sneak into the girls’ locker room.”

“You two are the weirdest couple,” Lydia says, distracted. “Why would he buy you slippers?”

“My feet get cold, and we’re not a couple,” Allison says to her Frappuccino, sulkily. She looks up. “What, didn’t Jackson ever buy you anything?”

That’s almost offensive. She was _more_ than worth presents. “Of course he did. He bought me flowers all the time. And he’s the one who gave me that Tiffany tennis bracelet.”

Allison tries not to scrunch up her nose again, which makes it look like she’s about to sneeze. “But – didn’t he buy you anything you actually _liked_?”

“I like jewelry,” Lydia says. She’s not actually sure where Allison is going with this. “ _And_ flowers.”

“Yeah,” Allison says, “But for your birthday you gave me a very specific list of books I could buy you on elliptic partial differential equations. I _still_ don’t know what that means, and Amazon keeps thinking I’m smart enough to need suggestions on my next really nerdy textbook purchase.”

“It’s not like I wanted to make a list,” Lydia says, “but you wouldn’t just get me a gift certificate like everyone else. You backed me into a corner, actually, and it was _my_ birthday – which you totally forgot about until after that disastrous party. I’m not sure why we’re friends.”

Allison ignores this, probably because it lacks a ring of truth, or because Lydia says it four times a week. “Also,” she says instead, “When something represented how much you loved him – don’t look at me that way! I know you did, okay, no matter what you’re feeling now, that’s why we’re friends – it wasn’t a stupid tennis bracelet. I bet you couldn’t even tell me where that bracelet is right now.”

That’s true, but Lydia just finishes her chai, because admitting that Allison is right sounds like defeat, and Lydia Martin doesn’t _do_ defeat, even when she hasn’t slept in more than a day. “I’ve never understood,” she says instead, “Why you’d wear a bracelet to play tennis.”

Allison gives her a look like _Lydia_ is the exasperating one in this relationship, and they give up their table to a couple of women in business suits wielding expensive tablets at one another.

When she thinks about it on the way out, Lydia’s not sure that she won this conversation.

 

iv.

For some reason, Lydia’s next meeting on the topic of everything that is wrong in her life takes place in the boys’ locker room. That she is currently standing in a place that smells strongly of sweat, mildew, and Axe body spray seems unimportant to everyone else. She’s strongly considering putting her foot down and insisting they go back to Starbucks.12

[(12) Considering the current research on school hours versus adolescent physiology and sleep deficits, there is an almost-malicious absence of coffee in the cafeteria. Some joker must have thought the salad bar was more important. Wrong.]

“They would _never_ ,” Isaac’s saying to Scott, upset, furious, flushed, “I know them, they would never do that to innocent people.” His eyes flicker between blue and gold.13

[(13) Starbucks seems unlikely when he can’t even keep his canines from elongating. Don’t werewolves ever _practice_?]

“It’s just that Erica got a little – “

“ – she was having a hard time with the change, and – “

“ – and maybe they’re confused, or something?” Scott’s effort to be fair comes out a little flat, but he makes it anyway.

“They wouldn’t,” Isaac repeats, shaking his head. “They wouldn’t help with what happened to you. I know Erica’s been a little – “

Lydia’s leaning against a locker, flipping through Scott’s math homework.14 “You’ve known them for, what – three months? During which you’ve been a _little_ distracted.” She raises an eyebrow at him.

[(14) Some people read Failbook.com for their schadenfreude-related needs; Lydia has fresh material from Scott McCall in the form of his math homework, nearly every day. She pays the price of helping him with it later, but the initial hilarity is always worth it. She doesn’t even have to worry that she doesn’t feel guilty, because he started passing quizzes again.]

“I _know_ ,” Isaac says, with a look at Scott that somehow seems to imply that Lydia couldn’t possibly understand the mystical bond between Derek Hale’s merry band of betas. “But – so was I, okay?”

“I remember,” Lydia says, not looking up from the jumble Scott’s made of the quadratic equation.

Isaac winces. “I know that Erica’s not – that she can be – but she’s not bad, okay? And Boyd is – he’s not violent. If they have them, it’s because they’re _keeping_ them somewhere. They’re _hurting_ them.”

Scott looks distressed, maybe because Isaac is distressed. Lydia watches them for a moment, eyes tracking Isaac’s hands; he keeps moving like he wants to use them to convince Scott of something, but can’t figure out how to mold Scott’s belief with his fingers. “Can you – I mean, they left, but do you think there’s any way that you can feel them? Or whatever?”

Isaac says, “It doesn’t _work_ like that. Maybe Derek or Peter might know something – “ He stops, with a guilty, defiant look at Lydia. “Peter’s got some files on his laptop. They’ve been looking through them in the evenings, sometimes. He might know.”

Stiles has been watching this from a bench, but now he stands up and puts an arm around Isaac’s shoulders like Isaac _isn’t_ a terrifying creature of the night. “Isaac – friend Isaac,” he says. “Pal. Buddy. Have I mentioned how soft and luscious your hair looks lately? Have you changed your conditioner?”

“No,” Isaac says warily. Stiles is totally freaking him out. Lydia leans back, watching with interest to see if the Stilinski method is going to yield results.

“Well, it is. What _I’m_ thinking, amigo, is that there’s no reason why you couldn’t put Peter’s files on a USB drive and bring them over. Just a copy! It’s not even like borrowing a book. Hey, don’t give me that look – think of all the times I’ve helped you out.”

“Are you _kidding_?” Isaac demands. “That’s pack property. It’s – secret. And personal! And it’s not mine, so I can’t give it to you.”

“It’s not anyone’s _diary_ ,” Lydia says. She folds Scott’s homework in half (which is neater than the way in which he presented it to her, anyway) and puts it in her purse. “It’s information. We need it. You need to get it for us.”

“It’s their family,” Isaac says. He looks at Scott, at Stiles, like he’s willing someone to understand. “It’s all they have left. Most of the books, the, the written stuff, the family papers – they all burned in the fire. There are a few things left, but, I mean, you get it, right? I can’t steal it. They’re – it’s the _pack’s_.”

Lydia knows immediately that it’s the wrong thing to do – _a_ wrong thing, anyway, something that is going to lace guilt through the rest of her day – but she does it anyway; that is, she throws Isaac into the lockers with a terrific clatter and presses her forearm into his throat and _lifts_ until his feet are barely touching the floor. “Let’s start this conversation over,” she suggests pleasantly.

His eyes – and Scott’s – burn gold.

“Whoa,” Stiles says, and Lydia can see from the corner of her eye that he is lifting his hands in a placating sort of way. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s all calm down, and have a reasonable, nonviolent conversation about this. Like Gandhi! Except we won’t talk about enemas _at all_ , and in the, ha ha, so very unlikely chance that anyone needs medical care, we will get on that right away, and also I’m assuming there won’t be any sketchy maybe-orgies or whatever, although, maybe that would calm everyone down, okay. But nobody will need medical help, because we are all _calming the fuck down._ ” His voice is a little higher at the end than it was when he started.

“Lydia,” Scott says urgently. “Lydia, come on. Isaac’s on our side.”

Lydia doesn’t drop Isaac. She’s committed to this and she is damn well going to see it through. “Isaac,” she says, ignoring the low growl in his throat, “I’m what they call a Slayer. That means that in a fight between you and me, there is an even greater probability now that I will kick your ass. So what I’d like for you to do is get me the goddamn files.”

“I _won’t_ ,” Isaac grits out. He meets her eyes, jaw hard, flushed; she’s so close that she can feel his breath on her face. Adrenaline thrums almost pleasantly through her body, and she feels awake and alive and _present_.

This has the strong potential to become a standoff.

They’re interrupted before she can see if it does. “Whoa,” says a voice behind them. Lydia turns – slowly – to see Danny and Jackson laden with lacrosse gear. “Um, Lydia?” Danny says. “Everything all right?”

Lydia forces herself to drop Isaac. It’s like letting go of something after you’ve gripped it so hard that your knuckles turn white – it’s hard to unbend, to step away. His breathing is uneven, his face red; he takes a step away, closer to Scott, and his shoulders hunch a little. He and Scott exchange some complicated facial expressions, and then Isaac leaves, brushing past Jackson and Danny. His closed fist hits the doorframe hard on his way out, and leaves a little indented notch in the wood behind 

“I’m gonna – “ Scott says, and follows after him.

She feels powerful – and awful, and small – and a little bit sick. She feels frustrated, out of control. She feels _watched_ , and she doesn’t want anyone’s eyes on her, because they make her feel like her skin is too small, something she needs to escape instead of inhabit.

She shrugs one shoulder in Danny’s direction anyway. After a moment, Danny says, “Is this a werewolf thing?”

Lydia says, irritably, “God, Jackson, you might actually be the _least_ discreet person in this room.”

“Because denting the lockers with Isaac Lahey’s head is incredibly low-profile,” Danny observes. He looks her up and down, bemused. “Jackson said you were immune to the whole werewolf thing.”

“Looks like Jackson found his own Yoda,” Stiles mutters, but Stiles can’t mutter to save his life, so everyone hears it.

“Jackson’s been having all kinds of interpersonal epiphanies this year,” Lydia says, because she can sharpen words like knives, and something in her just wants to hurt him right now; he’s just _standing_ there with his stupid mouth shut, and she can’t stomach the sight of his face. “Let’s just be grateful he’s moved on from paralyzing and eviscerating people.”

She walks out, Stiles on her heels.

They’re on their way to English by unspoken agreement, and coming down from the adrenaline, when Stiles touches her arm so that she stops. He says, “Hey, um, so, I’m totally down with the kick-ass girl superhero thing, like, it’s actually pretty much the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me and please don’t kick me out of your entourage for saying this, I mean, I would still have Scott and everything except I think we have a great little team bonding thing going on here, but you shouldn’t hit Isaac. Or anyone! But with Isaac there’s a whole, you know, thing, and I don’t think he’s actually going to respond to it very well, and he’s one of the few werewolf allies that we have, and he’s not even crazy anymore, so.” He shifts from foot to foot, and then looks her in the face. “You know that, right? You know that you shouldn’t hit Isaac, especially. It’s – it’s not okay." 

She feels tears in her throat and pushes them down, down, down; but Stiles is still meeting her dry eyes, so she lets out some of the air she’s been holding in since he started, and she says, “Yeah, I know.”

He nods too many times, looks at her for another few seconds, and then surprises her by wrapping an arm around her shoulders. He only leaves it there for a second, and looks surprised himself when he pulls away.

She feels the heat on her back for an hour afterward and wonders why.

 

v.

She meets Ms. Morell after school; Ms. Morell makes her wait in the guidance office while a student asks for help with the present subjunctive tense they’re doing in senior French. Lydia listens briefly to the stilted conversation – _Hier je lit le_ , um, _livre de_ –background _? Mais je ne compris pas_ 15 should be _J’ai lu la lecture générale hier, mais je ne la comprend pas_ but it’s obvious that this particular student does not do his readings _habituellement_ – before she gets bored.

[(15) Ms. Morell has clearly been passing her subpar accent on to her students.]

She crosses her legs, enjoying the smooth slide of thigh against thigh, and thinks about the degrees on the wall behind her. _Bachelor of Arts in French_ , says one, _University of British Columbia_. The next says, _Bachelor of Arts, Education, University of Saskatoon._ Huh; did people actually go to Saskatoon willingly? There’s a six-year gap between the French degree and Saskatoon. Maybe that’s when she’d become – ugh, does she have to use this terminology? – a Watcher.

The largest, fanciest degree is from Université de Montréal, and it says _M.A., Sciences de l’éducation, Option Psychopédagogie_. The year is 2010; Ms. Morell must have finished her degree while she was babysitting the Quebecois Slayers. At least the woman can multitask.

“How was your day?” Ms. Morell asks.

“Fine,” Lydia says.

“I forgot to say last night – it’s probably obvious, but you shouldn’t really tell anyone about the Slayer thing.”

“That ship’s sailed, pretty much,” Lydia says, examining her cuticles.16

[(16) She needs a manicure, but until things calm down she’ll have to settle for cuticle cream. Or maybe she’ll just appropriate the jar of Crème de la Mer from her mother’s bathroom.]

“That’s a little unfortunate,” Ms. Morell says after a pause. Her voice sounds somewhat tense. “May I ask who?”

“Allison, Stiles, and Scott,” Lydia says, unfazed. “First thing this morning. Isaac Lahey, and I’m guessing by extension that means Derek Hale. Danny and Jackson might have heard something too.” She’s pleased with herself, how she can say Jackson’s name like it’s anyone’s name, like it doesn’t matter. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

“So,” Ms. Morell says, sighing, “Pretty much everyone you know.”

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Lydia suggests pleasantly. “I’m not going to play games. The last time we all played Who Needs to Know, I lost, and I don’t like losing.”

“I understand,” Ms. Morell says, raising her hands. “I’m not trying to chastise you – it’s just that in general there’s a way we operate that capitalizes on each Slayer working alone.” She shrugs. “It’s not the end of the world if your friends know, but – do you remember what we talked about last semester?”

“You talked about a lot,” Lydia says, not even bothering to make it pointed. She’s had a long day. As far as her body is concerned, it’s still _yesterday_ – that’s how long it’s been.

Ms. Morell sits back. “The people closest to you,” she says, “can be the ones holding you back the most. Your friends might be good people – I think they are, for the most part – but what you’re going to become is far beyond anything they can imagine. It’s incredibly hard to Slayers to maintain relationships; actually, they used to be trained to actively avoid them. It promoted focus on the mission.”

Lydia says, “That sounds healthy.”

“It’s not how I operate,” Ms. Morell says. “I want you to have friends. I’m not going to forbid you from doing anything, not least because I don’t think you’d listen.”

“Sound analysis.”

“You’re going to be extraordinary, Lydia,” Ms. Morell says, and the way she says it is – sure, and almost reverent, and Lydia can’t work up the breath to protest that she is already, because nobody talks about her this way and she wants to hear it. She wants to soak it up while she can, because it never lasts. “You’re already used to being different from your peers, but this puts you on another level of that. The girls, the women I’ve worked with – it can be isolating. Lonely.”

“I don’t get lonely,” Lydia says. “Waste of time.”

Ms. Morell sighs again. Maybe she has a respiratory condition. “Let’s talk about goals for this week,” she says, “and then I’ll let you go home and get some sleep.”

“One other thing,” Lydia says. She disdains the idea of finishing the day by going home and curling up in bed. “Derek Hale apparently has a computer drive with a bunch of old werewolf encyclopedia entries. I’m working on getting Isaac to give it to us.”

“Tough sell,” Ms. Morell says.

“I can be very convincing,” Lydia says.

“Let me know how that goes,” Ms. Morell says. “And keep your phone on. I don’t think anything’s going to go down tonight – although I wouldn’t completely rule it out – but over the weekend I’m going to have you patrolling the town.”

“Patrolling?”

“On the lookout for trouble,” Ms. Morell says, mouth quirking.

“Do I look like a beat cop to you?”

“Well,” Ms. Morell says, “Whatever we call it, you have to do it, so try and rest up before then.”

Lydia’s not sure she likes the dictatorial gleam in Ms. Morell’s eye. She sees enough of that in the mirror.

 

vi.

After school, they end up at Scott’s house. Allison is actually grounded, so it’s just Lydia and Stiles and Scott.

Lydia texts Allison a picture of Scott trying to eat four wagon wheels at once.17

[(17) Allison sends back the following four texts:

 _16:42 lydia_  
 _1643 stop it lydia_  
 _16:43 its not fair and you know it, i am trying to be an adult here  
_ _16:44 oh my god his little face though he really is cute isn’t he_

and Lydia feels like she has done her good deed for the month.]

Lydia finishes her chemistry worksheet while Stiles calls his dad and Scott cleans up the wagon wheel disaster zone.

“Watching you do that is completely terrifying,” Stiles tells her. She raises her eyebrows at him. “For one thing, your printing is way too neat. Like one of those fonts you have to pay for, or steal illegally.”

“What can you actually steal legally?” Lydia asks, making her voice interested so that Stiles has to make that face of his.

“For another,” Stiles presses on, “ _that_ took me an hour yesterday, and you just did it in four minutes.”

“I audited o-chem at Beacon County Community College last summer,” Lydia says.

Scott looks up, distracted. “Why?”

“Everyone was at lacrosse camp, and I was bored,” Lydia says. “The point is, Harris’s class is nothing to get worked up over.” Neither was o-chem, but she’d had to pay attention, at least, so she knew what would be on the tests.

“I don’t understand why you’re still in high school,” Stiles says, after he and Scott exchange looks.

“My parents were afraid I’d be maladjusted without this amazing state-sponsored opportunity to observe an age-appropriate peer group in action,” she says.18

[(18) It had been eighth grade. The results of Lydia’s IQ test, the first official adult one she’d taken, had come in the mail, and Principal Balewa at BHMS had called her parents in for a meeting, not realizing or not caring that they were at the end of an acrimonious divorce. Her mother had ignored the literature he’d handed her and said, “I don’t want her to be one of those freaks you see on Dr. Phil ten years later, crying about how she can’t make friends.” And that had been that.]

Scott looks depressed. Despite his incredibly uneven jawline, he really does have an adorable little face. Although Lydia remembers kissing him only in the context of the way Jackson had looked when he found out (furious, then blank to cover it up, exactly what she wanted), she has to admit that he’s good-looking. “Can you help me with the homework?” he asks pitifully. “I’m still back in the stoichiometry unit.” That’s what they were studying when Scott was bitten, so Lydia allows herself to feel a little sorry for him.19 

[(19) Not that _her_ GPA is going to drop a single thousandth of a point over this Slayer nonsense.]

“Okay,” Lydia agrees. “If you promise to teach me everything you know about fighting werewolves later.”

“Do I even want to know why you’re making Scott your sensei?” Ms. McCall says, walking past Stiles to get to the fridge. She emerges with a bottle of water and a packed brown lunchbag. Her hair is still a little damp, and Lydia thinks it’s amazing that she looks so young, because she’s hardly wearing any makeup and Lydia is pretty sure that cosmetic enhancements aren’t in the McCall household budget.

“Desperate times?” Stiles suggests.

Ms. McCall sighs. “Are you kids going to do anything dangerous tonight?” She’s wearing hospital scrubs, and Lydia is unwillingly reminded of waking up attached to tubes and wires, fear, the coppery taste of an adrenaline surge. “Bungee-jumping, chicken on the railroad tracks – werewolf hunting – that kind of thing?”

“We don’t hunt werewolves! That’s cannibalism!” Scott protests.20

[(20) Lydia is often seriously concerned about his vocabulary. She heard about the bestiary-bestiality thing, and Allison’s not off the hook for that either.]

“Only if you _eat_ them,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes.

“Try not to eat anyone,” Ms. McCall says, sighing. “Avoid mortal peril. If Stiles suggests something, duct-tape him to the wall and call me immediately.” Stiles looks wounded, in that funny, ungrudging, well-worn way he has. Ms. McCall looks at him sternly, then turns her attention back to Scott. “ _Do your homework._ ”

“Lydia’s helping me,” Scott says hastily.

“I’m at the top of our class,” Lydia says complacently. “By a nine-percent margin.” It’s not exactly an achievement she’ll brag about after high school, but it is kind of satisfying for now.

“I’m helping, too,” Stiles offers.

“You’re _fifth_ ,” Lydia says, and he looks outraged, probably because the class rankings are not published. “You can make dinner.”

“So, I’m studying, Lydia’s supervising, and Stiles is making dinner,” Scott says. (Stiles is sulking.) “We might do some very safe martial arts practice later.”

“No shenanigans,” Ms. McCall says firmly, and Scott blushes when she kisses his cheek and ruffles his hair. “I’m working a double,” she tells him. “There’s leftovers for your lunch tomorrow. Text me when Stiles picks you up tomorrow morning, and I swear to God, Scott, you had better not skip any more classes, because there is no future in which you live at home forever, eating my cookies.” She punctuates this by snapping up the bag of wagon wheels and putting them in her big, utilitarian purse.

“I know,” Scott says, and hugs his mom, just like that. “Love you,” he says, like it’s easy.

“Love you too.” She pauses. “I said no shenanigans, right?” Scott nods and she leaves, kissing him on the cheek again.

Later, Lydia’s finished explaining polyatomic ions to Scott, and is waiting for him to finish the worksheet. Stiles actually did make dinner – some kind of casserole that involved a can of tomato soup, onions, noodles, and ground beef – and she’s pushing the last of it around on her plate. (Stiles gave her too much and then looked so tragic when she didn’t finish – like she’s some starving waif, like she really needs an extra cup of not-even-whole-wheat pasta in her diet – that she’s been picking at it ever since.21)

[(21) And when exactly had she started caring about Stiles Stilinski’s ego, especially at the expense of her waistline?]

“I’m stupid,” Scott says finally, throwing his pencil down on the table. He avoids her eyes, staring at the worksheet instead.

“Don’t say that,” Lydia says sharply, without thinking about it. “There are going to be enough people in your life telling you what you are.” She regrets it immediately afterward, but it’s already said, so she says, “You got turned into a werewolf. It’s not a bad excuse. Way better than mono.”

“Anyway, dude, you got good grades last year,” Stiles says. “You just need to catch up.”

“I guess.” Scott sighs.

“We’ll get you caught up,” Lydia says. “I can’t have my best friend dating a high school dropout.” The look in Scott’s eyes is so hopeful that she even cracks a smile. “No promises, McCall. Get your grades up and I might be convinced to do some lobbying on your behalf.”

“You’re the best person,” Scott tells her seriously, putting both hands on her shoulders. She laughs without meaning to. “The best.”

“You know that lobbying just means we’ll talk about you at Starbucks, right?”

“I have faith in your powers,” Scott says.

“Well, that’s how it should be,” she replies haughtily, and Stiles, working on a research paper for History on his laptop, snorts. “Do you have something to add, Stilinski?” she asks Scott, raising an eyebrow at him.

He turns an interesting shade of red, but he also rolls his eyes. _Points for Stiles_ , she thinks.

There are pictures of Scott and his mom on the walls – not that many, and all candids22, except for Scott’s last four school pictures. Scott and Ms. McCall laughing at Disneyland; toddler-Scott on his mom’s lap next to Santa Claus, apparently in the process of crying his eyes out. Scott and Stiles, both missing baby teeth, grinning at the camera at the town block party – you can tell because the trees are full and leafy, but there are Christmas lights strung up around them, blurring seasonally-inappropriate red and green. There’s a small one, not a standard size, and Lydia notices the uneven edge, cropped in the pre-Photoshop era: a young Scott and Ms. McCall on the beach, white smiles and the sun at their backs. There’s a hand on Ms. McCall’s elbow, but you can’t see whose it is.

[(22) There are pictures of Lydia on the walls at her own home, but they’re all professional; baby Lydia shot by some Anne Geddes wannabe, Lydia in a fancy bumblebee costume as an eight-year-old, Lydia before the freshman formal, shot by a real photographer in the Preserve. In that one, she’s with Jackson, and his hand is curved around the curve of her waist. The outline of spring trees in the background – well, she’s not going to think about that, God, stop it.]

“What happened to your dad?” she asks Scott, who looks frustrated again.

“He left,” Scott says simply.

“Sorry,” Lydia says, because at least her dad hadn’t done that.

“It’s okay,” Scott says. “It’s not a secret.”

“He was a butthole,” Stiles adds.

Scott nods.

Lydia’s quiet for a moment. Then she points a finger at the second-to-last question. “Anyway,” she says, “Can you tell me what you did wrong here?” Scott’s face twists in concentration, and they get back to work. Once the homework is done (no more incompletes for Scott McCall, is Lydia’s new schoolwork motto), she takes him back to the chapter they started after Introduction to Stoichiometry, and quizzes him on chemical equilibrium.

Later, after she’s changed into her favorite leggings and a tank top, Scott says, “Hey.” She pauses in pinning her hair back, raises her eyebrows at him. “About Isaac.” He looks uncomfortable.

She reminds herself that liking Scott more than she did before is no excuse to get soft. “Stiles covered it,” she tells him, and he looks relieved until she adds, “You’d better get him to cough up those files.”

They fight, with Stiles taking notes and throwing out comments and laughing when Scott ends up on his ass – which, now that he’s trying, happens a lot less than Lydia was hoping. He’s controlled, though; his claws never break her skin, and other than that they’re a good match, although she has to pull her punches a little just to keep him in the game. Maybe they’re both learning from it, because he starts to duck her right hook with startling consistency until Stiles mentions that she might want to learn to punch someone with her _other_ arm, and maybe kick sometimes too, and that starts them down the road of YouTube tutorials until it’s full dark and they’re working in insufficient light from the porch.

When she goes home, she’s sore and there is dead grass in her hair, but she’s good at a few new things. It wasn’t the worst, anyway.

 

vii.

Lydia gets home feeling energized, so she takes Prada for a walk and afterwards gives her too many treats. (Prada jumps for them, and it makes Lydia laugh. The house is quiet, so she notices how loud she is, and modulates her tone.) She sits cross-legged on her bed – the cleaning ladies must have come today, because someone changed the sheets, and they smell clean and feel crisp – and checks her email.

There’s the usual: One from her dad, complaining about his latest set of meetings. One from her mother, checking in as an excuse to complain about _her_ meetings. One from Allison: A long, rambling treatise on the many reasons that she needs to be single right now no matter how adorable Scott’s stupid face is, and don’t send me any more pictures, okay, it is not good best friend behavior. 23 A list of YouTube videos for her to look up from Stiles and Scott.

[(23) Also included: A heavy dose of self-loathing. Lydia sighs and makes a mental note to spend some time wielding logic at Allison’s many neuroses.]

There’s an email from Jackson. The subject line is “Hi”.

In what godforsaken Tumblr hell-universe is _hi_ a _subject_? It’s a tepid greeting at _best_. That’s what he approaches her with? This is what she gets for dating a high school lacrosse player, for thinking she loved one, instead of just waiting – waiting for the tall, handsome genius she will meet at MIT, the doctoral advisor (maybe) who wears Oliver Peoples horn-rims and Tom Ford suits. She thinks about his shiny shoes, the faint Daniel Craiglike wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, how he will realize that she can match him blow for academic blow (and then some). The surprise in his eyes that doesn’t turn intimidated. 

She thinks about someone who doesn’t know her until she’s ready to be known. The interviews they’ll give24 when she cracks twin primes, his hand on her leg. Maybe he’ll make stupid math puns in bed, and she’ll be allowed to laugh, and maybe she’ll bring him coffee next morning, before he goes running or rock climbing or whatever solo sport he does.

[(24) To _Science_ , to the _Times_ , to reporters at _Cosmo_ ’s Fun Fearless Females of 2014 awards reception; she’ll wear Balenciaga unless Alexander Wang screws it up.]

She closes her eyes for a second, then deletes the email, and for good measure deletes all of her deleted messages permanently, a safeguard against an ill-advised foray into sentimentality.

She makes herself a pot of coffee and spends the night reading Gerard Argent’s bestiary. Sleep is for people who need it; she’s a Slayer. She’ll sleep when she wants. There’s a Latin dictionary at her wrist, but she read through that last year, and barely needs it now.

She takes careful notes on _gelloudes_ , _vetala_ , _lilu, mananangal, jiang shi_ , trying to figure out if these are vampires by another name or other breeds of monsters – or maybe if they share a common ancestor and evolved under different socio-geographic conditions like everything else. The text is not always in Latin, so she spends hours translating Aramaic and Greek until the new words and syntaxes and alphabets live in her brain alongside the old ones. She screencaps one page that is almost entirely in Chinese and sends it to Ms. Morell, who must have someone she trusts for these kinds of things.

She works until sunrise, when she finds a note written much later than the majority of the text it’s next to; it’s in French, dated 1749. The scanned page is imperfect, but when translated it says: “ _Although we have from time to time come across beasts that drink human blood, none compare to the demons who inhabit human corpses and are called vampires by the people who are their natural prey. The work of Dom Calmet in this matter was imperfect, but when questioned he mentioned a society of hunters previously unknown to us –_ “ and there the text breaks off, and is not continued on the next page.

She finishes not with vampires but instead with an interesting exercise in French Creole from the early 20th century.25 It looks like someone took it out of a printed book and pasted it into the beastiary; she makes a mental note to make fun of Allison for her family’s idea of scrapbooking. _The born loogaroo_ (she reads) _most often lives with its family, generally far from human settlements, and rarely attacks unless the family is threatened. However, we have seen cases where these creatures leave the natural unit and form an unstable bond with others. In this case they must be put down with utmost haste, for their thirst for new territory is almost as deep as their taste for human flesh._

[(25) Interesting to see it written; she has to say some of the words out loud to connect them with the flatter, less interesting French she already knows.]

She types a few sentences into the ‘notes’ column in her Excel file, and goes to shower and get dressed for school.

 

viii.

 _Mahealani, D.  
_ _[11:02]_ Seriously, what is up with you?  
 _[11:02]_ Are you a werewolf?  
 _[11:03]_ If you’re going to be the alpha now, I think I have a right to know.

 _Lydia Martin  
_ _[11:04]_ Danny, we’re learning important things about chemistry right now.

 _Mahealani, D.  
_ _[11:06]_ You don’t need to pay attention in this class.

 _Lydia Martin  
_ _[11:06]_ You do.  
 _[11:07]_ But I will spare you the suspense: I am not a werewolf. 

 _Mahealani, D.  
_ _[11:08]_ Can we talk after class?

 _Lydia Martin  
_ _[11:09]_ You’re Jackson’s friend.

 _Mahealani, D.  
_ _[11:09]_ I can be friends with people who aren’t friends with Jackson.  
 _[11:09]_ If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have any other friends.

 _Lydia Martin  
_ _[11:10]_ That doesn’t mean we’re friends.

 _Mahealani, D.  
_ _[11:10]_ I’ve known you since kindergarten.  
 _[11:10]_ You’re stuck with me.

 _Lydia Martin  
_ _[11:11]_ I’m not stuck with anyone. 

 _Mahealani, D.  
_ _[11:11]_ Lydia.

 _Lydia Martin  
_ _[11:13]_ Free advice: Learn to text without looking, or you’re going to spend a lot of quality time with Harris after school.

 

ix.

Ms. Morell calls after Lydia and her mother have had vegan Chinese for dinner; Lydia’s a little jittery from the heavy dose of MSG that came in her sweet and sour not-pork. “Hi,” she says into her phone, sitting on her bed so that she can examine her toes. The polish there is smooth and perfect, the coral color she’d chosen two weeks ago – a lifetime ago, just after Jackson, just before the rest of it – still unchipped. Well, that’s winter. 

“I have some good news and some bad news,” Ms. Morell says. “Which do you want first?”

“Whichever doesn’t require the other one to make sense,” Lydia says. Obviously.

“Okay,” Ms. Morell says, drawing it out like Lydia’s being difficult and she’s being patient. “I think that the alpha pack is going to be active tonight. I’d like for you to go out to the Beacon Hills Preserve; from what Alan and I can tell, there’s some evidence that they’re spending a significant amount of time there.”

“What kind of evidence?” Lydia asks.

“Mostly dead pets,” Ms. Morell says. “People have found them mangled and half-eaten.”

“They eat _pets_?” Lydia asks. She glances over at Prada, who’s asleep on her little pink dog bed. Her paws twitch, a sign that she’s chasing rabbits in her sleep.

“It’s an intimidation tactic,” Ms. Morell says. “At least, that’s my best guess; they’ve been circling around the town for a couple of weeks now, but I don’t have a lot of information on how alpha packs interact with their environment. Nutritionally, I assume that they eat what everyone else eats.”

“What’s the other news?” Lydia asks.

“The good news,” Ms. Morell says, “is that Alan is going to talk to Derek and Peter Hale about any resources they might have.”

“So if Isaac doesn’t cough it up – “

“Let’s leave Isaac Lahey out of it,” Ms. Morell says.

Lydia says, “People should take care of themselves.”

Ms. Morell is quiet for a few moments. “Let Alan talk to Derek,” she says, “And then we’ll worry about alternate methods.”

“Fine,” Lydia says, clipped. “So you want me out there? Patrolling,” she says, although the word itself sounds awkward. “For alpha werewolves.”

“That’s the idea,” Ms. Morell says. 

“It seems like wandering around in the forest looking for unstable werewolves is a pretty good way to get killed,” Lydia says. “I’m not feeling like you’ve really fleshed out the details of this plan.”

Ms. Morell says, “I have faith in your ingenuity.”

Fair enough.

 

x.

Beacon Hills Preserve, late at night, is a place Lydia associates with illicit bonfires26 and Jackson27. It smells like dead leaves and damp and winter; she’s ruining Allison’s motorcycle boots in the muck, but she’ll buy her new ones, better ones, maybe the the Tod’s ones she saw online. It’s dark, and the moon is low, but she has better senses now, and the night doesn’t scare her any more than it ever did. Anyone can be brave in the daylight, after all.

[(26) Tedious. (27) Also tedious.]

There aren’t any alpha werewolves running around. At least, if there are, they’re more subtle than Annie had been at the diner.28 It’s silent and calm, and _boring_ , so Lydia occupies herself by trying to remember the moves in the Kasparov-Kramnik game in 2000, and then has to move on to something more neutral when the implications of giving up your queen in the first eight moves make her uneasy.

[(28) Not that _that’s_ exactly a challenge.]

It’s a couple of hours before she hears anything but the sound of Allison’s boots in last autumn’s abscission, so, when she does, her hand tightens on her dad’s hunting knife.

It’s Derek Hale, of course. The only alpha werewolf she’s _not_ supposed to kill. He can probably hear the anxious tattoo of her heart – a werewolf quality she sincerely hates – so she focuses on making it angry instead, putting all that energy to constructive use.

“Lydia,” Derek says, looking like a stupid lurker in his stupid leather jacket. For someone who drives such a nice car, he dresses like a _mechanic_. She spares a moment to judge him for that.

“What’s got you creeping around the woods at this hour?” she asks, raising her eyebrows at him. They’re actually in a little clearing, so there’s some light to see by, and she’s pleased to see that he looks annoyed.

“Same as you, probably,” he says. His eyes rake over her, but she doesn’t get the sense that he’s enjoying her figure – which is highly enjoyable, by the way. He says, “I heard about the Slayer thing.”

She shrugs. “Word gets around when you can tap your own little network of battered children.”

He steps closer. “You’re walking a dangerous line,” he says. “You seem to have this idea that werewolves aren’t going to _hurt_ you.”

“Excuse me,” Lydia says, her voice high; she pulls it back from brittle, down to scathing, and continues: “I think I’m the very last person you want to remind about the _dangers_ of _werewolves_. I’m very personally well-versed in basically all the horrible things you do to people.”

“You pinned Isaac by the throat,” Derek says, sounding frustrated; Lydia feels heat rise into her cheeks. “You did the same thing to me.”

“I have a policy of not taking shit from hypocrites,” Lydia snaps, finally, frustrated herself, frustrated by the flush in her skin and the sick, tight feeling in her stomach.

Derek’s quiet for a moment. He takes a breath, looks like he’s about to talk – but doesn’t, not for another few seconds. “I understand,” he grits out, eventually, like it actually hurts him to say, “That you have issues – legitimate issues – with Peter staying in Beacon Hills. I don’t – it’s reasonable, but there are also reasons – and you have to _stop_ getting physical just because you think it’s the easiest way. It’s not, and you’re going to get yourself or someone else _killed_.“ 29

[(29) And seriously, is there anything more hypocritical than Derek Hale telling her to stop getting physical with people? Stiles practically never stops bitching about all the times Derek has intimidated him or slammed his head into a steering wheel or blah, blah, blah.]

“Spare me,” Lydia says, her voice unhurried. “I could honestly not care less about your uncooperative werewolf fight club policies.”

“Do you understand,” Derek snaps, stepping forward to grab her arm, “do you _understand_ how goddamn lucky you are that Isaac has the kind of control he does? You threw him against a locker and put your arm on his _throat_. He could have torn yours _out_. Erica would have – _Boyd_ would have. What the hell were you thinking?”

She yanks her arm back from him, so hard that it actually jolts him a little. In the movement, she sees his eyes flash with that eerie animal shine. “You know,” she says, “I was thinking about how very, very little I liked the idea of going to you and Peter and begging for this secret little werewolf research cache. Considering how incredibly helpful you’ve been throughout this entire nightmare of a year, by which I mean that time you decided to murder me.”30

[(30) What she doesn’t say, but realizes then, is: _I wasn’t thinking_.]

Derek shakes his head. “I thought Scott was bad – I thought _Stiles_ was bad. Hell, I nearly killed Allison Argent myself.” He shakes his head; his voice is low but still furious. “You – you’re going to burn this whole town to the ground.” He digs in his pocket for a moment, and then thrusts something into her hand. Their fingers brush only briefly, and she almost drops it.

It’s a USB drive. She can just make out that it says _NYU_ on its side.

“What’s this?” she demands, but her stomach twists and she knows before he says it.

“It’s the information you asked Isaac to take,” he says.

Lydia says, “He said it was a secret.”

“He said it wasn’t _his_ secret,” Derek says. “It’s mine, and I’m giving it to you.”

She turns it in her fingers. It’s just a thumb drive, the kind that they hand out free at banks if you sign up for a credit card. She doesn’t ask him why. Instead, she says, “Thank you,” crisply, like she’s thanking him for mowing her lawn, cleaning out the eaves.31

[(31) She remembers: After the first time she’d slept with Jackson, he’d said _thank you_ , sounding dazed, and, giddy, she’d laughed into his shoulder.]

They stare at one another for a second; Derek looks like a hurt kid who doesn’t want you to know he’s hurt.

“You should get out of here,” she says finally, lifting her chin. “I have this whole protecting-the-innocent thing to do. Important work. You understand.”

“Obviously,” he says, suddenly angry again, “you have no idea what that means. You might be a Slayer, but you’re an _idiot_. You’re an arrogant, stupid little girl and I wish to God you’d get the hell out of here before you get _everyone_ killed.”

There are things Lydia can take – she’s been hit with _bitch_ so often in her life that she now mostly views it as an unintentional compliment – but _idiot_ isn’t one of them. “What,” she says, “Are you going to give me a lecture on how we all need to work together? I know you’re basically the teamwork czar around here, you’re seriously the best leader anyone could hope for, but – “

“Shut _up_.” Derek’s not yelling, but he’s in her face, and she doesn’t think he intends it to be intimidating (it’s not, it’s _not_ ) but she can’t help but listen, for some reason, squaring her jaw and crossing her arms. “I don’t have time to get into a pissing match with you today, Lydia. You think I want Peter around? You think I live with him because of some misplaced family loyalty? You think this is how I imagined my life would be, sleeping in a room next to that?”

“ _Yes_ ,” she says, “because there is literally no other reason you could have for keeping him around. He killed your _sister_.” She feels something cold on her cheeks, and realizes that she’s crying. Her eyes are traitors, like the rest of the world. She takes a breath and it shudders through her.

For a few moments, she can only hear the sound of her own heartbeat and Derek’s breath, which puffs visibly in the cold air, too quick to be calm. He grits out, “Since you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me which you’d rather defend against – a knife in the back, or a sniper on a rooftop.”

She’s silent, getting herself back under control. She wonders when it became comforting that at least she’s only crying in front of Derek Hale, instead of someone who matters.

Derek says, “I can’t kick him out, and I can’t kill him – I can’t kill him because alphas _can’t_. Not their own pack. And even if I could, it might – you understand that it could kill Isaac, too. The repercussions of what happens when you kill one of your own betas can hurt the entire pack, and we’re _too small_.”

She wipes her eyes, probably smearing her mascara everywhere, and says, “Could I kill him? If I had the – if I had a reason, an opportunity.” 

There’s a short silence again. She sees his eyes – not red, but pale and steady – and something hurts where her stomach meets her sternum.

He says, “I’m counting on it.”

Somewhere along the line, they’ve both relaxed back a little; he’s stopped leaning toward her, into her personal space, and she’s dropped her knife-hand.

She doesn’t get a chance to find out what comes after this, because something explodes out of the darkness and slams her into the ground. After that, she’s twisting to avoid teeth snapping at her throat, and she has the impression of grossly disfigured half-human features; and after that she can’t tell which one of the several creatures is Derek except that one of them doesn’t try to put claws through her chest. In return, she tries not to stab that one in the face. 

Finally, she gets herself enough room to point her knife in the right direction, and then the real fight is on. The blade catches and sinks into the soft flesh of someone’s stomach, and she twists and yanks up, spilling gore everywhere, all over her.

The smell is overwhelming, awful, something she would never have imagined – and it’s hot, fever-hot, person-hot – but she doesn’t have time to gag and that’s a reflex she spent a lot of time learning to suppress for Jackson, so swallows her stomach back down to where it belongs, and watches the face flicker back to human.32

[(32) It’s funny how pain makes werewolves human again. It doesn’t work that way for most people.]

She can’t tell if it’s Annie, or another person – werewolf – werewolf person – just that he or she whines, high and grating, and Lydia strikes again, bringing the handle of her knife down against a temple, turning her hand to strike at its throat, moving faster than she ever has in her life.33

[(33) It’s like every dance class Lydia took, except that her feet and her hands and her head work at the same time, and it’s someone else who’s too far behind the beat, and instead of insipid Baroque chamber music there’s just the industrial rush of blood in her ears. Instead of feeling bored and conspicuous she only remembers the sensation of drowning, freezing, bleeding, falling, and only feels the impact of each strike race up her limbs.] 

That body falls, something for someone else to stumble over, but another is at her, and they’re rolling; she has to credit Scott for his excellent tutelage, because she knows how to twist away from claws, although she feels a burst of pain near her ribs and knows she’s been scratched.

She’s immune; she’s invincible.

It’s still desperate and rushed and terrifying and exhilarating, but finally she manages to throw the werewolf off and away; it hits the ground and stills for a second, and that’s when Derek grabs her arm with blunt human fingers and says, “Come _on_ ,” through a mouthful of too-sharp teeth, and then they’re running. She has the vague sense that she’s running faster than she’s ever run before, that the blur of the trees going past isn’t normal, but she can’t think about that while she’s tasting the bitter copper of adrenaline. She follows Derek’s footsteps – it only briefly occurs to her to split away from him; he knows the forest better than she could ever hope to – and they don’t stop for a long time.

They’ve been still, panting, for only a few seconds when she hears running coming toward them, and at this point she is operating almost wholly on instinct, which means she throws the attacker down on the ground and has her foot on his throat before Derek barks, “ _Stop_ ,” and she catches herself up short.

It’s Stiles.

She removes the heel of Allison’s boot from his person. 

He swallows, putting a hand to his bobbing Adam’s apple, and says, “That – was actually a lot less sexy than I always thought it would be.” He reaches over for his flashlight, tilts it up at Lydia and then over to Derek. (Derek’s eyes reflect the light back.)

Lydia says, “What in God’s name are you doing running around in a werewolf-infested forest, Stilinski?” and, rolling her eyes, extends a hand to help him up. He’s heavier than he looks, but it’s no match for her newly-enhanced Slayer strength. She’s going to have to do tests to figure out the upper limits of her new skills.

“It’s a Friday night,” Derek says irritably. “What _else_ would he be doing?”

“I have just as much of a right to run around the horrible, werewolf-infested death trap woods as anyone else,” Stiles says.

There are howls in the distance; Derek tenses, tilting his head.34 “That was Erica,” he says finally, his face still, expressionless.

[(34) He _really_ looks like Scott when he uses his super-hearing.]

“Erica, um,” Stiles says, “Doesn’t sound friendly. I mean. Less than usual.”

“She’s – under the influence of the alpha pack,” Derek says. “I think.”

Lydia says, “You _think_?” and puts one hand on her hip; regrets it when she feels something slick and realizes it’s part of someone’s digestive system. 35

[(35) Maybe Erica’s, come to that.]

“Is it possible that she’s doing this on her own?” Stiles asks. Lydia’s grateful that she is not the one who has to say it, for once. “I mean, she’s not exactly – um – “

“Stable,” Lydia fills in, bored with the halt.

“That,” Stiles says. “Yeah.”

“She’s not unstable,” Derek snaps. “She’s – “

“A bitter teenage former epileptic that you turned into a savage mythological rage beast?” Lydia interjects. Stiles laughs a little, almost giddy, definitely hysterical. “You’re right. She sounds like exactly the kind of werewolf I’d like to meet tonight.” She rolls her eyes, tosses her hair.

Derek looks like he hates his life; his frown actually turns the corners of his mouth down, which Lydia had not thought an actual thing until she met him. Well, he’s the one who chose Beacon Hills over whatever life gets you an NYU flash drive. He chose this, he chose Erica, he chose his dirty boots and gritty stubble and bad attitude. He’s an adult, and this is what he chose.

Lydia doesn’t feel bad for people who can choose their own lives. Personal policy.

“So,” Stiles says, when the silence drags on too long for him to stand. “What do we do now?”

“I’m supposed to hang out here,” Lydia says. “Protecting the townsfolk.”

“Want some company?” Stiles asks. “Scott is around here somewhere.”

“I guess I can drill him on his French verbs,” Lydia says, pulling her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans.

Derek mutters, “Jesus Christ,” under his breath.

“ _I’m_ sorry,” Lydia says, raising an eyebrow. “Are you contributing to this conversation? Because all I hear is someone who has distracted Scott from his schoolwork more than enough already.”

“ _I’m_ sorry,” Derek returns irritably, “Were you the one keeping him in one piece? I’m pretty sure that was me.”

A retort is fully-formed, ready to come out of her mouth, when she feels the NYU flash drive digging into her thigh, and thinks about the boy who owned it first. She narrows her eyes at him, takes in the too-short sleeves of his shirt, which expose bony wrists but not the impressive forearms they’re connected to.

“What?” he snaps.

“You look stupid when you’re a werewolf,” she says after a beat, making Stiles cough, and feels pleased when the corners of Derek’s mouth turn downward again.

There’s another howl: Louder, closer, followed by others.

It feels like the first lacrosse match of the season: The thrill and thrum of expectation, your heart in your throat, standing around waiting for the action to start up.  It’s the possibility – the possibility that you’ll win, that you’ll lose, that someone will bleed – it’s the same feeling she had at the finals, and everyone knows how that turned out.

It’s such a cliché, so trite, but this time she is not in the stands; this time she’s in the middle of the action, and a rush of realization that tastes like coppery adrenaline hits her when she discovers that it’s exactly where she’s always wanted to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, thanks for sticking with this story. Chapter 3 is... partially in existence. Kind of. Listen, I'm not going to lie, it might be a while, but I promise I will not give up on this story. If only to get to the good part where everyone is less sucky at being besties.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I Can See The Sunset For Miles Ahead](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1031907) by [auroreanrave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/auroreanrave/pseuds/auroreanrave)




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